Dreamweaver and html editing

PeakOutput

So long story short iv been studying digital media design and am about to graduate and have just gotten a web developer job with a friends company. we did some html css php java and c in my course but it was two years ago so im rusty but getting back into it slowly but surely

right now they just have me doing some basic pages in joomla and the WYSIWYG editor is really ****ty and writing straight html and then refreshing pages to see its affect is really time consuming and im thinking there must be a better way

so i like dreamweavers' split view as i can see the result from the code immediately which i think would help me a lot

but is there a way that i can somehow link dreamweaver to the server so that i can access all the files(images etc) that are stored there for the website so that i can use the proper paths in my code so its just a matter of copying and pasting the code into the joomla editor and hitting save

hope that makes sense

thanks in advance

amen

not sure about integrating dreamweaver but there are loads of joomla WYSIWYG plugin editors some better than others. You could try one of those.

refreshing pages to see its affect is really time consuming and im thinking there must be a better way

thats a tried and trusted way. I assume you are doing this on a local copy of joomla and not the server hosting the live site?

PeakOutput

amen wrote: »

not sure about integrating dreamweaver but there are loads of joomla WYSIWYG plugin editors some better than others. You could try one of those.

ye ill start looking into them tomorrow and see if anything pops up that looks good

thats a tried and trusted way. I assume you are doing this on a local copy of joomla and not the server hosting the live site?

its not local but it isn't live either

I think im going to try and do the code in dreamweaver until i get it how i like it and then copy and paste it into the joomla article and then just change the src for images and stuff and see if that speeds me up enough to make it worth while

tricky D

There isn't really any editor that is actually WYSIWYG. It's more like What You See Is What You Might Get If You're Lucky. The problem is that there's a few different renderers for browsers, some of which handle displays differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%28HTML%29 Dreamweaver's design view isn't much good at dealing with these differences. Imo the best way is to sort out the design with plain old css, xhtml in NotePad++ and a lot of refreshing in various browsers and if Dreamweaver is to be used, it should only be used for production after the design layout is done, with any code rewriting disabled.

Webmonkey

tricky D wrote: »

There isn't really any editor that is actually WYSIWYG. It's more like What You See Is What You Might Get If You're Lucky. The problem is that there's a few different renderers for browsers, some of which handle displays differently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%28HTML%29 Dreamweaver's design view isn't much good at dealing with these differences. Imo the best way is to sort out the design with plain old css, xhtml in NotePad++ and a lot of refreshing in various browsers and if Dreamweaver is to be used, it should only be used for production after the design layout is done, with any code rewriting disabled.

I agree, none of my designs even show in dreamweavers GUI but are 100% correct and render okay in browsers.

Better off with notepad. Might seem daunting but it really isn't all that bad once you know how to use CSS properly.

PeakOutput

Any particular recomendations for a html editor on mac then? id prefer to not use text edit

DRakE

PeakOutput wrote: »

Any particular recomendations for a html editor on mac then? id prefer to not use text edit

http://www.panic.com/coda/ is great but $99

Fanny Cradock

What's wrong with using the code view in DW and hitting f12 from time to time? You can even just leave the browser and refresh it after saving your changes.

tadcan

Textmate looks good as well, used it briefly when I was fixing a mac. Costs €45.

http://macromates.com/

PeakOutput

Fanny Cradock wrote: »

What's wrong with using the code view in DW and hitting f12 from time to time? You can even just leave the browser and refresh it after saving your changes.

nothing my main concern is being able to link to content stored on the server and have it display in whatever preview im using, be it dw or taco or coda which iv just downloaded the free trials to

but it looks like rokpad editor extension for joomla might be what im looking for

Creamy Goodness

smultron is a good editor on mac, and it's free. may not have WYSIWYG properties or even connecting to remote servers etc but it's one of the best out there.

OP regarding the paths issue, can you not clone whatever environment is on your 'not local but not live machine' and have it local so that when it comes ready to deployment/submitting that you can push all to the 'not local but not live machine' and do a quick test and then bam there you go?

amen

notepad++ your only man

krd

PeakOutput wrote: »

but is there a way that i can somehow link dreamweaver to the server so that i can access all the files(images etc) that are stored there for the website so that i can use the proper paths in my code so its just a matter of copying and pasting the code into the joomla editor and hitting save

hope that makes sense

thanks in advance

If you use the server paths in your HTML on your local machine the files should be retrieved from the server.

There is this thing web developers do - I can't remember the details. Usually for development you don't use your local machine to hold the files - you have them on a server (close as possible to the live site) - an internal server and then there's a trick that can be done with a host file on the network to make all the local machines think the development server is the live site. Once all your testing is done and you're ready to go live, you transfer everything to the live external web folder and then remove the host thingy - your have to refresh something on your local machine (which I can't remember what) and then your local machine will see the live site instead of the internal site.