Dreamweaver MX Upgrade from Dreamweaver 3 or 4

This is a visual editor, which means you can create and edit a Web page by selecting items such as tables, forms, and images from a tabbed palette. The Properties panel lets you specify details such as borders, styles, and hyperlinks, and you can also use the visual editor for frames and layers. Many designers also like to edit the underlying HTML, and this is where Dreamweaver MX comes into its own. It supports either a pure code view or a split view that lets you click seamlessly between the code and visual editors. A lot of the features previously found in HomeSite, Macromedia's text-based Web editor, are now integrated into Dreamweaver, including pop-up code hints, a snippets panel that lets you keep handy pieces of code for reuse, and a tag chooser that lets you grab the right tag from a list. An O'Reilly tag reference is built in.

Dreamweaver's template support deserves special mention. Templates give you a quick start with a number of predesigned pages. In Dreamweaver MX, they can also be used to lock down areas of the page, so that contributors can create and edit a story without disturbing the design. Templates can be nested so that changes to an underlying template ripple through the pages that use it for powerful site-wide updates.

Macromedia used to market a product called Dreamweaver UltraDev, which allowed for rapid development of Web applications featuring online databases, member login, and other server-side elements. In Dreamweaver MX, this capability is built in. It has also been extended, adding support for ASP.NET and PHP as well as ColdFusion, JavaServer pages, and traditional ASP. Nonspecialists will find themselves able to build rich dynamic pages, while the integrated code editor makes this a capable development product as well. In fact, Dreamweaver MX has also replaced ColdFusion Studio as the primary development tool for ColdFusion MX. It is a uniquely flexible package.

Overall, it's hard to find fault with Dreamweaver MX. It's true that its complexity and professional features make it harder to pick up than some rival products. The abundance of panels and options can be confusing, and a high-resolution screen is required. In addition, the Studio MX products, which include Dreamweaver, are a better value for those who need more than one of the MX series. However, this takes nothing away from the excellence of Dreamweaver as the first-choice tool for professionals. --Tim Anderson

Amazon.com Product Description
Build Web sites and Internet applications with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Work within one environment to easily create and manage any professional Web site, whether it's built using HTML, XHTML, XML, Web services, ColdFusion, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, or PHP. Dreamweaver MX is a complete solution combining the visual layout tools of Dreamweaver, the Web application features of Dreamweaver UltraDev, and the code editing support of HomeSite.

The new integrated workspace shared with Macromedia Flash MX and Fireworks MX includes tabbed document windows, dockable panel groups, customizable toolbars, and integrated file browsing. Prebuilt layouts and code, including site structures, forms, accessible templates, and JavaScript functions for interactivity, allow you to get started fast. A site setup wizard helps configure site information instantly for managing dynamic sites, staged sites, or sites hosted by ISPs.

Write code faster than ever before using features like code hints, tag editors, extensible color coding, tag choosers, snippets, and code validation. Accelerate development with support for XML, including creating, editing, validating XML code, and importing XML schemas. Easily introspect XML Web services. Ensure standards compliance with default creation of XHTML output, easy conversion from standard HTML to XHTML, and increased support for CSS2.

Note: This is an upgrade version for owners of Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver UltraDev, ColdFusion Studio 4.5 or later, or JRun Studio.

Indeed, Dreamweaver MX handles my CSS-styled pages with aplomb. But to my delight, it adds many features which I have found invaluable, such as "Snippets" (a library of code fragments you can insert anywhere), the ability to "cloak" folders so that they are not included when synchronizing to the server (invaluable for log and statistics folders on the server), the FTP log, a much improved style sheet editor, a nicer and more configurable workspace, and much, much more.

Dreamweaver MX is a delight to use and has made development and maintenance of my web sites even easier than in previous versions. If you have an earlier version of Dreamweaver, MX is definitely worth the upgrade. (And if you don't have Dreamweaver, you're missing out on what I think is the world's best web site design and maintenance product.)


one of the better editors   January 7, 2003
 1 out of 2 found this review helpful

I've used FrontPage, FirstPage 2000, and other site design packages. MX is THE most comprehensive site design product on the market to date. With integrated Flash, PHP, ASP, JSP, and others support, it makes site design easier. Too bad they don't support the processing of forms; hopefully that will come with time.

From a CIW certified professional.


analyse your need before you upgrade   September 11, 2002
 7 out of 8 found this review helpful

In terms of pure dreamweaver functionality, this version doesnt have any ground breaking advances, but by the inclusion of ultra-devs data driven dynamic site development tools, dreamweaver and ultra-dev have finally merged into one product dreamweaver mx.

Having been a user of both Dreamweaver and Ultra-dev since their arrival on the pro web design scene, this represents a big change in one respect in that data driven web sites are now being delivered into the hands of every web site producer with the same product they use to design simple pages.

The most exiting thing for me is the new PHP feature, and in this i find Macromedia continuing in their trend of offering what their users are most hungry for, now i have no excuse for not learning PHP.

In terms of changes to the actual core design product, i have been happily switching between dreamweaver 4 and mx, and theres nothing in mx that i cant live without, obviously im not here refering to the dynamic data side of things here.

thankfully you can work with mx and make it look like the old dreamweaver interface, im currently working with the new integrated interface, and it all looks a bit frontpage to me, ill give it a chance though, admittedly it is slighly more efficient, but its just starting to look a lot less like a design tool, and a lot more like a developers tool.

Of the new features the ability to creare code snippets is pretty handy, but nothing too revolutionary, and the tag-inspector does speed up speed of changes to the code minded, but again nothing very new.

if your using dreamweaver for mainly design orientated web production, its possible the new features may not be enough to sway the upgrade, one big plus is the support for all the new and emergent technologies and standards, xml, xhtml, and as i mentioned earlier PHP on the dynamic side.

Dreamweaver is still the leading professional web design tool, it will reward all the learning by giving an easy to use cutting edge web development tool. The huge community of developers and users who provide countless extensions to dreamweaver allow easy adaption to whatever tasks it may be put.


Even great for novices.......if you take the time   June 27, 2002
 18 out of 19 found this review helpful

At first glance, the Dreamweaver [DW] interface seems very complicated but after using it for a while, the interface is very intuitative. I was using FrontPage [FP] for web design, but I couldn't control the layout of the tables on the page. I am not a pro. With DW I could! The properties of each element can be shown in a little box on the screen [a improvement over R mouse clicking on then clicking on the properties tag in FP]. The eye dropper icon works anywhere on the the open program - I could grab colors off the menu bar!

Not all was rosy at first.........I installed a demo on two different computers and both computers locked up when using ...it seemed to be very unstable. So I looked to tech support and could not find anyone to call.....so I entered the support forum and posted what happened. My answer came within 24 hours in a dialogue with another user. After that the program ran relatively flawless. A note.....this program can consume a lot of resources on a Win 9.x/Me system and anti-virus software will cause it to crash - SOLUTION: turn your anti-virus software off and make sure you don't have a lot of unnecessary background programs running........give it lots of breathing room!

FP is used a lot because it has a relatively easy look and feel but once you get used to FP, the quirks and limitations begin to show. In DW if you are interesting in seeing how code is formed, just switch to the Code/view and 2 windows open - your WYSIWYG window and the HTML code above! Great!

Conclusion: Download the Demo from Macromedia - don't be put off by the seemingly complicated interface, play around and see for yourself. Then buy it.