Customer Reviews

Macromedia Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce Edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Drumbeat e-commerce is a powerful e-commerce and asp design tool but unfortuantely comes with very little, not to say too little literature on how to put the aspects of the site together. The asp elements are well explained but the e-commerce tasks and instructions come in a brief guide that doesn't answer all questions relative to building an e-commerce application. If it wasn't for this lack of instructions in the user's guide, which Microsoft is well known for, I would have given the software five stars. Think about buying Drumbeat for Dummies to complete the product.

I bought the Drumbeat 2000 E-commerce package last August. To put it mildly, I was disappointed. The creation of non-"e-commerce" pages are fairly easy to do after you get an understanding of Drumbeat's inheritance. Don't be mislead by the "easy-to-use" statements on the package. If you've worked with a lot of Microsoft products - beware - this isn't like any of Microsoft's applications. (Not that that's bad.)Nothing will be familiar to you. You will have to learn a whole new vocabulary - Drumspeak. When I got this it was made by Elemental Software. When I was notified that Macromedia had purchased it, I was very hopeful that the problems would be ironed-out. Dreamweaver is an awesome program. Now, I'll be looking for Drumbeat to inherit the excellence of Macromedia's products. They have always had great documentation and support for their products. They are truly easy to learn. The present Drumbeat version by Macromedia is exactly the same as the Elemental Software version. All that was changed was the box. The next upgrade promises to be the best version of Drumbeat. I'll wait for that one.

I have been using Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce edition for approximately 6 months now and absolutely love it! The "Starting Points" (pre-written website applications used for examples of various aspects of the app) really hammer home the basics. Macromedia has a very handy online database of tips & tricks for using Drumbeat as well. One thing that many 'hardcore' ASP/HTML coders will miss is the ability to view the source code as you go; this is only accessible after publishing the various pages and viewing source in another editor or in something like notepad. The shopping cart is a cinch to setup, and the overall layout of Drumbeat is very comfortable. I have created an online record store as well as 3 other sites - using Drumbeat for everything but image manipulation. This is a good application and a dream for people who's strength lies more in the design than the coding. You can lay everything out exactly as you want, right click on the elements and add Java/VB-Script to them to assign various interactions. Piece of Cake!

I bought Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce edition back in November of 1999. I have since used this application to create approximately 10 data driven web applications and websites - in 1/4 of the time that it would have taken me to create them in Visual InterDev! The user interface is laid out very well - a very comfortable environment to work in. (One note on this - you need to have your screen resolution set at 1024x768 to have adequate room to view all of the elements) The "drag & drop" javascript "contracts" and "site elements" make creating dynamic pages a snap. After you run through a couple of the "Starting Points" (pre-constructed mini-web applications/sites with explanations on how to use them)you will get the hang of what elements do what and how they can interact with the other pages elements. Using Drumbeat 2000 eCommerce, I was able to create an online music retailer site - with full checkout / shopping cart functionality - in less than two months! I was amazed! One thing that some will find odd about Drumbeat is that there isn't any way to view the HTML/ASP within the application. You must first publish the pages to your web server (IIS or Personal) and then open the pages in another HTML application or in notepad. I found this mildly irrating at first, but since Drumbeat does almost all of the coding for you - you can just go with what it has propogated.