Quick Tip: Notable New Features in Dreamweaver CS5

Quick Tip: Notable New Features in Dreamweaver CS5

on Apr 12th 2010 with 81 comments

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

Browserlab

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

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

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

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?

Tags: adobe
 
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  • Colin Hoernig

    Launch video isn’t working :P

    • Colin Hoernig

      Meant to say Launch Video link isn’t working :)

  • http://dmartinng.com/ Dodie

    Well… They gatta face the fact that CMS are so popular and it’s widely used for web designers now :D

  • http://blog.stephenli.ca Stephen

    Great new features. Unfortunately, they’re already common among other IDE’s. I wonder if they finally fixed their Javascript editor’s weird indenting problem.

    • http://www.schultzstudio.com Chris

      Man I hope so. That drives me crazy.

  • http://www,bransonwerner.com Branson

    The CS5 Launch this morning didn’t really hit on the new features in Dreamweaver. Thanks for going more in depth.

  • Dragonshadow

    Did they finally get a good php autocomplete / code inspection? As in, does it have functionality like aptana/phpstorm/etc ?

  • Ravi Babu

    Seems pretty cool! Adobe’s good job!! But video doesn’t open/ run. Please check the link.

  • http://www.bumena.com Emrah

    Jeffrey,

    Edit the following section.

    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?

    Thank you.

  • http://www.jc-designs.net/blog Jeremy Carlson

    CMS Support would have come in handy about 2 versions ago…BEFORE I had to figure WordPress out. Now it just seems pointless.

    BrowserLab is alright, but I use the Spoon plugin for Firefox (no mac version, sorry). Waaaaaay better. I will give it credit though. I would use that I think before IETester. But I swear they were going to charge for it. Is this not the case anymore??

    • Christopher Beckwith

      Yes, Adobe has previously announced it is currently in Beta and they will begin charging for the service in 2011. Their last estimates said around 10-20 per month for the service.

      BrowserLab is great as well as CSS Inspect, but I believe you can only inspect the code in Dreamweaver’s Browser, which in my case works to begin with. Where I need it is in other browsers such as web inspect for safari, web inspect for chrome, and most importantly the web developer tools for IE. Since those tools tell me how that particular browser is rendering the CSS, where is their tool will only tell me how their browser is rendering it.

  • http://www.sagalbot.com Jeff

    Looks pretty cool. Site specific code completion is something I’ve been praying for in Coda. I can’t wait to get my hands on the trial to see if the quirks that pushed me away from CS4 are gone.

    Broswerlab is mediocre at best. The fact that it only works on live websites is a big downfall in my opinion. I do the cross browser testing BEFORE the site goes live. Obviously there are ways around this, private testing urls and the like, but I’ll stick to my VMWare fusion.

    • Christopher Beckwith

      Actually, BrowserLabs does work for local content as well before publishing to a live server when you use it with Dreamweaver CS4, (as well as soon to be CS5).

      http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/browserlab/ “Also, Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software users have access to additional functionality such as testing local and active content.”

      For CS4 you have to install a plugin, but it will be native with CS5.

  • Sundowatch

    I think it must debug php and asp.net codes.

  • aaustin22

    I didn’t see anything about it on the launch video this morning, but with the CMS support, does that mean Contribute is gone? I’ve never used Contribute, I don’t know anyone who’s used Contribute and with all the free CMS solutions out there, I don’t know why you would want to use Contribute to begin with.

  • eric

    If it weren’t for Adobe sticking it in CS suite I think it would have gone the way of the do-do. With that said since I bought it today I might as well use it.

  • Damon

    For me with each new feature they add to DW is just another layer of bloat. I like simple apps such as Textmate and Coda. I left Dreamweaver for Coda awhile back and don’t think I’ll ever return, except for creating an occasional data table.

    • gavin

      I agree, I have DW CS4, I used it once after buying Coda. It is so bloated.

      Not many developers on ThemeForest talk about Dreamweaver, and they are creating amazing sites. I think that says a lot.

      I would even go as far as saying DW puts young developers off.

    • Pieter

      Dreamweaver is somewhere in between simple apps like textmate/coda/espresso and complicated IDEs, thus appealing to almost no-one.

  • http://www.edgarleijs.nl Edgar Leijs

    NIce features, don’t get me wrong, but my CS4 version is buggy-ish and that’s really starting to annoy me! I care about a decent stable program not about the shiny accessories…

  • http://sonergonul.com/ Soner Gönül

    Nice

    Thanks..

  • Monkkey

    I saw the CS5 Launce…..Pretty awesome things you can do with dreamweaver!

  • Anna

    There is also better PHP error checking and contextual code hinting.

    If you screw up a line of PHP, it’ll tell you so you don’t have to wait until you break it in localhost. Instead of reading ‘Parse Error on line 32,” and realizing that it’s not on line 32, but on line 27… It just didn’t become a problem until line 32. Huzzah.

    The contextual hinting will be great, too. How many times have typed in ‘wid *ENTER*’ and realized that the CSS code hinting selected ‘Widows’? Now, you can type in dt, and it’ll select ‘width’ for you. Amazing.

    I’m just cursing that they STILL haven’t added in a ‘toggle commented code’ button. I hate sifting through over-commented code. There are too many developers out there that were forced to comment EVERY line of code while they were learning, and just picked up the habit of making comments like ‘While loop that loops through all the DB entries with $row = $r->fetch_assoc()” …. -_-; As a PHP tutor, I see it a lot.

  • http://www.nouveller.com/ Benjamin Reid

    I’m all for WordPress/CMS support! :D

    • Christopher Beckwith

      Number one improvement I have been asking for, for the past 3 years. Love Coda and Espresso, because of their light weight and beautiful interface, but DW finally has given me a reason to switch back.

  • http://www.crearedesign.co.uk Stephen Webb

    It looks like they’ll be some exciting new features in CS5 that will allow better testing and inspection of sites. The inclusion of Browserlab in particular is a key selling point, as this will allow much more rapid testing of sites on a variety of platforms, which is an essential par of the development process for any website.

    I will be interested to see exactly what Content Management System support is given, integration with WordPress would be a great feature that will certainly be snapped up by designers. The improved CSS inspection tool will also be particularly useful, especially when combined with CMS files, as the complexity of these make them hard to easily navigate.

    With the impending release of WordPress 3 and the rise in popularity of this and similar CMS systems it seems that Adobe have really started to target this market. I’ll be interested to see if CS5 lives up to the expetations.

  • Flash Predator

    The new wordpress support is a good idea, but have they solved the problem of dreamweaver deleting files from the server when it crashes, It’s crazy I tell you…

  • fay

    Hi …Dreamweaver CS5 will support html5 ?

    • Christopher Beckwith

      Their is a lot to HTML5. It’s a code editor so you can certainly start using experimental html5 code such as and to lay out your site for the fun of it.

      Or if you mean will Flash CS5 export to HTML5 since Apple said no to exporting to Flash, and then the answer is yes:

      http://www.9to5mac.com/Flash-html5-canvas-35409730

  • Mark Sinkinson

    No matter how ‘good’ they claim it to be, the pricing is still a complete joke when there are free alternatives (or even just £50) that go quite a long way to matching the functionality Dreamweaver provides.

    It’s £411 in the UK for Dreamweaver CS5, that’s compared to $400 in America. We pay twice the price for the same product, which is ridiculous considering the student/teacher version is only £110.

    I for one will not be buying it at that price, however I may download it and crack it, because I would like it, but not at anywhere near that price

    • Gavin

      This is true.

      A CS5 suit is the same price as a MacBookPro!

      • Christopher Beckwith

        The suite may be expensive to for the casual user, but most users who purchase the whole suite would gain back the cost of the software easily after their first project with it. If you are not, then you are not charging enough and doing work that may be better suited for more affordable apps.

  • http://felixb.se Felix

    Way too expensive… Way too bloated…

  • http://www.pequenotux.blogspot.com Willian

    Gedit rules :)

  • http://spotdex.com Davidmoreen

    There are some really nice new features, but I don’t think that I am going to the CS5 suite. I meant I only had CS4 for a year and I don’t feel that I got 1400 dollars worth out of it…

    • http://www.schultzstudio.com Chris

      But CS5 has $600 worth of features. Upgrade…

  • http://www.rorrocket.com rocket

    Well!! Dream weaver is kinda outdated now.. Designers have stopped using it after the evolution of table less designs. There is no point in using it anymore.

    • Christopher Beckwith

      Dreamweaver began embracing CSS over Table several versions ago. Designers and Developers started to leave it behind because like Word it became a bloated program that does everything except the few things important to its modern use base. Most importantly no CMS support.

      Now that they have CMS support, a feature Coda and Espresso may never have, I and other designers and developers may be going back to DW even though it lacks the Mac Luster and light weight nature of the other two.

  • Bruno

    Intersting new features but nothing really new that you dont have in Netbeans. Netbeans code completion is amazing and it supports any php framework including WordPress.
    The live view seems useless,

    My favourites IDE´s remain Netbeans for PHP and Visual Studio for .NET.

  • http://www.giulianoliker.com Giuliano

    I never stopped using Dreamweaver at work. At home I don’t use it and only reason is price tag. I think they will have much more success with something like Dreamweaver Lite, something close to IDEs we are using. Of course, Lite shouldn’t cost more than $99.

  • http://nabbiechan.tumblr.com Chazzel

    I gotta have to admit, I love the new features of the Dreamweaver CS5. Sadly I don’t use it anymore.

  • http://www.bryankwilliams.com Bryan

    I’ll add my voice to the many, cool features, but have already moved on. Sure code correction would have been nice when I was learning wordpress, but now it’s second nature. $50 for textmate, and another $50 or so for virtual machine and an old copy of windows and you can have all the benefits of testing your sites in the actual browsers for a fraction of the cost for Dreamweaver. All that without the bloated features of Dreamweaver that just get in your way.

    Great post on the features though. Dreamweaver wasn’t touched much on the intro video, so it’s nice to see the details.

  • http://cmstutorials.org krike

    CMS Support & Site-Specific Code Completion :D woooooot must buy it :D finally!

  • toni

    Dreamweaver is by far the best app for web development. I’ve used it for over 10 years now since it was Macromedia Dreamweaver 3.0 and I’ve build the most complex web sites one can imagine. Keep up the good work!

  • James

    Yay, another bloated DW out there. Just what we needed..

    Nah, I started hating the DW after CS2. Way too much bloat, so many useless options, so many default config files that just didnt work for me. I`m a developer, i dont want DW to start in design mode. Or the built-in FTP client! Yay what a waste of time.. Never got it fully working, and in the moments it actually responded, it deleted and moved files i did not want it to move.

    Sorry for the hate, but Adobe pushed me in this corner. I think im gonna pass this version of DW too :)

    I`ll stick with my editors Netbeans and Visual Studio, which are both free for me. ( yeah legally.. )

  • http://www.seowisedesigns.com Yheng

    I think this might help speeds up the CMS theme development also.

    Quite useful.

  • Torque

    Still no improvements of text editing functionalities (code centric stuff). Will there be configurable keyboard shortcuts for duplicating lines? blocks? What about columnar selections? What about discontiguous selections?

    From a strictly code centric perspective, Aptana + AnyEdit Tools + Tidy + a few plugins kills Dreamweaver any day. But then, Dreamweaver isn’t really for die hard text coders. It’s a hybrid tool which excels at a lot of things, like the (near useless) CS suite integration, the useless live code preview features etc.

    I’ll stick with Aptana until something miraculous is done about the coding and text centric stuff in DW.

  • http://xpressabhi.com abhishek

    I will use it for wordpress theme development.

  • http://www.shaundunne.com Shaun

    Been using a text editor called Intype for a while now. Dreamweaver is bloated, but CS5 has sort of sucked me back in with the WordPress/Drupal intergration. I’ll be getting an upgrade of the master suite anyhow, might aswell see if dreamweaver has the new chops.

  • http://www.metaversetechnolabs.com Jigar

    I think this is very useful then CS3 and CS4..

    Great :)

  • Larry

    After CS-3 I had to decide if the upgrade to CS-4 was worth it. It wasn’t. I started using both DW and Microsoft’s Expression Web. Both were buggy. But EW has developed into a good low cost, alternative to DW. Best of all, EW lead me to the free Microsoft Web Developer Express and the MVC platform. I may be wrong, but I believe ASP.NET MVC with cleaner URL’s and less client side code is the future. This is evidenced by Google’s announcement this week that page load speed is being considered in page rank.

  • http://cardview.net Cardview

    I`m really curious to see how the CMS support works… Hope i get the trial version soon so i can test it out :)

  • Paulu

    CMS/wordpress feature is plus for theme development. I might actually upgrade to CS5 because of that.

  • http://meleebeats.com Nic Bertino

    As a user of DW (amongst other things), I took an interest in this article – my first thought about code completion for WordPress and other CMS packages was “Why isn’t this in Coda?”

    After doing a little research, guess what? It is available in Coda as well.

    http://pradador.com/code/coda/wordpressmode/

    A little Google goes a long way.

  • http://conecode.com Chris

    It seems this is a version that can be skipped. In my humblest of opinions. CS4 was a big update from CS3. This is not that big a jump.

  • http://www.nysaan.com iMezied

    Greatest new features , specially CMS features
    thanks :)

  • http://www.permanaj.net Permana Jayanta

    DW CS4 really slow down my work, because it’s bloated. Then I change to NetBeans. Maybe Adobe should make DW Run Faster rather than adding features that even free software like NetBeans have it.

  • Boris Badenov

    I started to use Dreamweaver with MacroMedia 8 and seems with every new version there seems to be some awesome new features (integration with CMS) but each time a new feature is added, it just adds to the bloat.

    Most of my development is on a Macbook (travel a lot). To test a site in Winblows, I rely on Parallels and IE Tester. I find that Dreamweaver (and the bloat) does slow my system down a bit. I have switched to Coda, light, easy, fast, nimble. Does it do all that DW does? No but then it does not make my system run at speeds of a french waiter (for all you francophiles, that means sloooooooooooow).

  • n0ta

    As someone else pointed in the comments, DW is in the middle o the two development extremes: light code editors and heavy IDEs. Speaking from a front-end developer´s point of view, it´s difficult to consider nowadays that kind of software. Personally, I prefer light editors+zencoding pulgins (in Windows Sublime Text, in OSX Textmate).

    However, some of those features are really interesting, and the people behind those light editors can take some of them and add them to thier soft. That´s the most interesting point for some of us!

  • http://samcs.me Sam Christie-Sgro

    Will this help at all with html to WP conversion? or html to any other CMS?

  • http://tutspot.com/ Gal

    It seems Dreamweaver CS5 is a genuine upgrade to CS4, which in my opinion emphasized WYSIWYG aspect too much. I think CS5 suits itself to the environment; many people nowadays are giving up amateur “drag and drop” website design for some moderately laid out HTML and CSS.

    I think the main cool features of DW CS5 are:
    1. CMS support (which would hopefully allow easy maintainability for blog development on a local machine).
    2. Site specific code completion (for those of us that actually infer to the code).

    I wouldn’t use DW if you’re developing the server-end of an application, b/c its whole WYSIWYG aspect would thus render useless. However, you could use DW5 to test/edit HTML output and CSS/JS files.

    I’m glad they added this support for server-side interaction. It was obviously lacking in CS4.

  • Davis

    No matter what new Integrated Development Environment comes out, I’ll stick with my favourite editor: Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN. Nothing beats Visual Studio for .Net development, PHP development [plugin available], and excellent HTML/CSS support.

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