Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac [OLD VERSION]

by Macromedia

Product Features

• All-in-one design and code editor to support the way you work.
• Build standards-based sites using rich visual tools for XHTML and CSS.
• Integrate XML-based data with a powerful, visual, drag-and-drop workflow.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000ALM5Y8
• Date first available at Amazon.com: December 19, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,608 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 is the industry-leading web development tool, enabling users to efficiently design, develop and maintain standards-based websites and applications. A world-class design and code editor in a single tool, Dreamweaver 8 is designed for the most advanced web developers, as well as for the less experienced.

Visual CSS aids help you see complex CSS layouts better than ever. See all that's new in Dreamweaver 8

The dedicated CSS tab keeps you in control of your CSS-driven layout. View larger.

Easily collapse snippets of code so you can stay focused on the big picture. View larger.

Dreamweaver supports and guides users as their skills grow and web technologies evolve, facilitating easy and quick adoption of new technologies and methodologies. You don't need to be an advanced developer to take advantage of the many industry-leading features of Dreamweaver 8. Adding Flash Video, for instance, is a cinch. In fact, you can add Flash Video to any site with fewer than five clicks of a mouse. Simply point Dreamweaver to any Flash Video file, select the playback controls to surface on the page, and get rolling.

The unified CSS panel provides a powerful and easy way to understand the cascade of styles applied to content, as well as quick access to making changes without having to navigate a lot of code through trial and error. Working with XML is also simplified considerably. And with access to over three million Dreamweaver developers, the Dreamweaver community can provide you with invaluable benefits, including the Macromedia Developer Center, developer certification programs, training and seminars, user forums, and independent community support sites. More than 800 free downloadable extensions are available through the Macromedia Dreamweaver Exchange.

New and Enhanced Features
New features and optimized workflows reduce the time required to complete common development tasks. Dreamweaver 8 does for XML and XSLT what Dreamweaver 1 did for HTML. Simply point any page to an XML file or a URL of an XML feed, and Dreamweaver will introspect it to enable dragging and dropping the appropriate fields onto the page. From there, pop into code view to work with improved code hinting support for XML and XSLT, and take advantage of the new XML and XSLT reference content.

Dreamweaver 8 also takes CSS-based design to the next level. The new, unified CSS panel makes complex CSS simple. In fact, you can learn CSS by reviewing the consolidated view and visual representation of the cascade as it applies to content for quick access and power. For working with CSS for content position, the new CSS layout visualization provides design-time visual aids to quickly and easily review page structure. The styles rendering toolbar previews how pages work with different CSS media types.

For greater control over design, Dreamweaver 8 also lets you zoom in on designs to de-bug complex layouts and review images. Use guides to accurately position content on pages to improve the accuracy between comps and finished product. And when you need to focus on a single piece of code, you can stay focused by selectively collapsing and expanding sections of code by selection or by tag with code collapse.

Product Description

Dreamweaver 8 is the industry-leading web development tool, enabling users to efficiently design, develop and maintain standards-based websites and applications. With Dreamweaver 8, web developers go from start to finish, creating and maintaining basic websites to advanced applications that support best practices and the latest technologies. Get more done with Dreamweaver 8. New features and optimized workflows reduce the time required to complete common tasks. Integrate XML data with a powerful drag and drop workflow. Zoom in to get control over design and stay focused on the code with Code Collapse. Add Flash Video in five clicks of a mouse.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

103 of 105 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still the best of the WYSIWYG field, November 1, 2005

By 

Gregory A. Beamer "Cowboy" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Dreamweaver consistently ranks high in the field of WYSIWYG web site editors. This release does not stray from this position. Considering GoLive and FrontPage are the current competition, it is not hard to see why (will be interesting to see what comes out with Microsoft Expressions Quartz).

As with previous versions, Dreamweaver 8 has the standard Dreamweaver interface. When you install, you have the option of setting up like a developer or setting up like a designer. It is not as easy to change the scheme (or not as evident), but this is not a major deal as a single developer rarely changes the setup of his development environment.

Dreamweaver 8 touts itself as the king of CSS and it has certainly made some wonderful inroads. By default, you can create styles in a page or in a stylesheet. Unfortunately, it falls a little short in allowing you to change your mind in this place, as well. It would be nice, for example, to drag tested styles from a test page up to the stylesheet. Instead, I have to manually cut and paste or recreate styles. Yes, this is minor, but can't someone make a tool that does this? I would also love to see a tool that recognizes I have already created a style with the same feature or allows me to use the standard font and paragraph changes and automatically create a style. But, I digress, there is no tool that does that ... yet.

The CSS Styles tab gives you a great way of getting down to the properties of a particular CSS style. If you do not want to bring up the designer, which is how you normally create your style, you simply add properties to the style in the CSS Styles tab. Very nice feature. A little different than the properties view in MS products, but much more compact.

Dreamweaver 8 is better at .NET development than FrontPage. It also allows a variety of other development paradigms: ASP (either VBScript or JavaScript), ASP.NET (C# or VB.NET), ColdFusion, JSP and PHP (with MySQL). This makes it a good all around tool for development. I would still not trade my Visual Studio, but Dreamweaver gives me a lot of bang for my buck and Visual Studio has a horrible design surface (at least in the latest implementation - VS 2005).

Dreamweaver still has the best behaviors (client side scripting), but they have not made any real inroads to new functionality in this regard. This has been a major selling point to me in the past and I wish they would have included something to help with AJAX (Asynch JavaScript and XML).

Of the new features, I find the CSS most compelling (mentioned above) and also very aggrevating (Macromedia did not take them far enough for my likings). You also have the ability to zoom on design and use guides (good for CSS layouts). There is also a better Flash integration and collapsable code regions. None of these are grand enough for me to personally take the upgrade plunge.

Down to the nitty gritty. Here are the questions you are probably wanting to know the answer to.

1. Should you buy Dreamweaver (assuming you do not already own a previous version)? It really depends. If you do not have a tool, this is still the best on the market. If you have FrontPage, you might get Dreamweaver if you need the flexibility of working outside of the Microsoft world, otherwise I would say no. The same is true if you have GoLive, as it has many similar features.

2. Should you upgrade? This really comes down to a few features and how important they are to you.

A) If you are heavy on CSS, you might want to upgrade, although I am not sure that this is the best option unless Macromedia really fills in this area. It was not quite enough for me to feel compelled to move on right now.

B) Use a lot of flash? The time savings might be a good reason to move to this version.

C) Need productivity helps, like code collapse, guides and the ability to zoom in on your design? This is the only tool I know of currently that has these features.

Dreamweaver 8 is a good product. If I did not have a previous version, I would seriously consider the cost and bite the bullet, as I feel it is worth the price ($399 street). But, I do not see it worth the $199 street price for the upgrade, aty least not for me. The additional CSS is nice, but it is not enough of a productivity change for me to justify the cost, esp. when I am fairly fast at working with CSS without the additional features.

56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreamweaver fits the bill..., July 28, 2006

By 

WDM "spiceminesofkessel" (Weatherford, OK United States) - See all my reviews

I have recently become more serious about web page design. I looked at other products and tried them out. However, Dreamweaver has exceeded my expectations. I am not an advanced user by any means, so my rating might have a "new user bias" to it. My first web site used a WYSIWYG editor similar to Frontpage. Then, I downloaded the 30 day trial of Dreamweaver and redesigned the site. Productivity greatly increased and the interface is very easy to navigate, once you get used to it. The new web site is by far more impressive, user friendly, and feature rich without a cut in productivity. Learning Dreamweaver is a pleasure. If you are familiar with web design, the learning curve is very nice. I was making web pages within a couple of hours of downloading the trial. Tutorials are readily available in the Help menu and on the Adobe web site. Of course, you can always find a good book here on Amazon. If the price of Dreamweaver can fit your budget and you are serious about making impressive web sites, I highly recommend the consideration.

40 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Marketing Hype - MX2004 is More Stable/Professional, December 6, 2005

By 

Bobby Bro "Bobby Bro" (Houston, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Pros: code editor is improved, good idea with the FTP background capabilities, love the new zoom feature

Cons: Macromedia put this out hastily, bugs in the FTP, the file times aren't correct, can't use it in a professional enviornment, no word of when updater will be available

I think Macromedia raced to get this one to market. I've been using Dreamweaver since version 2. It's a powerful tool that has evolved into something close to remarkable concerning development of professional web sites/applications. But...

If you have Dreamweaver MX 2004, you have a better version of Dreamweaver than version 8. I can't use 8 in a professional environment due to the way that it stamps file times incorrectly. Collegues are left wondering what the real time was that a page was last worked on. Sometimes the FTP doesn't upload the files that are selected. In a professional environment, this is a major quirk - imagine trying to move 100 files and 10 of them don't make it. You've got to go through all of them to figure out which ones didn't. I've never seen this from another version of Dreamweaver. .

I was hooked by the marketing presentations from Macromedia. I'm glad that Adobe bought them out because the way that the company looked in the end wasn't the same as the first few years I was using their products. But I am afraid of what Adobe will do to the Macromedia suite. KEEP YOUR MX2004 STUDIO. It may contain the last stable version of Dreamweaver. I can imagine working on web sites for the next 5 years with MX2004. If DW8 gets a good update, then I would recommend getting it at that point because the new features are really cool and worth the upgrade if you are in a professional environment. If not, then you may not even notice them.