Quick Tip: Notable New Features in Dreamweaver CS5

If you’re a Twitter user, it was difficult not to be aware of Adobe’s CS5 global launch presentation. While they did an excellent job of promoting Photoshop and Flash, other applications, such as Dreamweaver, only received limited coverage. Nonetheless, take a look at some of the awesome new features in Dreamweaver CS5, slated to be released in mid-May.

1. BrowserLab Integration

Adobe, for some time now, has offered a helpful, and free, service called Browserlab. For those unfamiliar, Browserlab is a Live service that allows you to view snapshots of your website in a variety of browsers, not too dissimilar from Browsershots.org. Luckily, with CS5, this service is fully integrated into Dreamweaver, even allowing us the ability to stack multiple snapshots of our designs, from various browsers, on top of one another. This is especially helpful for those of us with pedantic attentions to detail.

“Preview dynamic web pages and local content with multiple viewing, diagnostic, and comparison tools.”

2. CMS Support

Perhaps the most welcomed and exciting new addition to Dreamweaver, there is now a “live view” option, when working on, for instance, templates for a variety of CMSs, including WordPress! This means that you can browse pages, populated with postings from your database, directly within Dreamweaver. How cool is that?

“Enjoy authoring and testing support for content management system frameworks like WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal.”

3. Site-Specific Code Completion

This is something to be excited about. WIth this latest release, we now can utilize intellisense on site specific coding. For example, imagine being able to access the various WordPress functions directly from the intellisense pop-up? Pretty cool!

“Benefit from code hinting on nonstandard files and directories in Dreamweaver..”

4. Adobe Business Catalyst Integration

This new feature is being promoted heavily, and, while it might definitely prove to be appealing to some designers and non-programmers, I doubt our particular community will utilize this new addition. Essentially, it allows you to design and build websites with minimal coding experience.

“Leverage integration between Dreamweaver and the Adobe Business Catalyst® service (available separately) to deliver powerful online businesses without programming.”

5. Improved CSS Inspection

The Dreamweaver team has added a new feature which allows us to, after clicking the “Inspect” button, click on various elements on our page, and immediately view the applicable styling associated with that particular element. If you’re familiar with the Web Developer Toolbar, and Firebug, you’ll be quite familiar with this. Nonetheless, it’s a nice addition to have available from directly within the IDE.

“Visually display the CSS box model in detail, and easily toggle CSS properties without reading code or needing to use a separate utility.”

Missed the Launch Video?

If you didn’t catch the live unveiling, you can watch it here. So what’s the consensus? Has Dreamweaver finally come through for us? Will it take the place of your IDE of choice?