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Create, Organize, and Manage Your Web Site
by Ken Cox
December 20, 2005
Macromedia Studio 8 is a suite of professional tools for creating, organizing, and managing everything that goes into a sophisticated Web site. The suite includes the highly capable Dreamweaver page editor; Flash Professional for multimedia movies; Fireworks for graphics; Contribute for maintaining content; and FlashPaper, which I'll describe later. This review concentrates mainly on Dreamweaver (see Figure 1).
Dreamweaver 8 outshines other WYSIWYG editors for ease of use at design time. You can build complex nested tables and attractive CSS stylesheets by switching among Dreamweaver's drag-and-drop design view, intuitive properties pages, and syntax-coloring code editor. Features such as the dual-screen workspace layout show the maturity of this software. If your Web content comes in Microsoft Word format, you'll appreciate the Paste Special options that retain the text's structure (such as paragraphs, lists, and tables) while stripping out Word's bloated markup and excess space between paragraphs.
My impression has long been that Macromedia tools are more oriented to graphic designers, making it easy for these creative non-programmers to add high-end features without writing code. For example, this release offers drag-and-drop support for XML and XSLT transformations on both the client and the server. You can put RSS content on a Web page in only a few minutes. Simply provide the feed's URL, drag the field names from the schema view of the Bindings tab, and do some formatting. You can perform XML transformations without understanding the syntax of xsl:value-of statements.
Dreamweaver's development environment recognizes ASP.NET 1.1's major server controls and data objects, but ASP.NET developers might be disappointed that Microsoft's Web platform is just another supported scenario along with JSP and PHP. Macromedia provides the best integration with its own ColdFusion MX product.
Macromedia Contribute helps you keep your Web site's content current. In the time it takes to fill out a change request, the content owner can connect to a working site, select a page, tweak the text, and publish the changes—all without being overwhelmed or bothering the developers. Yes, you can restrict changes to specific areas.
Another pleasant surprise is the FlashPaper 2 utility, which lets you "print" documents or Web pages as Flash or PDF files. You can e-mail someone a view of your work in these ubiquitous formats within seconds. For some reason, Macromedia makes you install Contribute to get FlashPaper.
Products in the Studio 8 suite are well documented for all levels of users and offered in a range of formats, including Web pages, HTML Help, PDF, and even a solid printed manual. This complete Web site package is especially well suited to creative types, non-technical users, and those who work best in graphical environments.
Studio 8
Macromedia
Web: www.macromedia.com
Phone: 800-457-1774; 415-832-2000
Price: $999
Quick Facts: Suite of tools for creating, organizing, and managing the elements that make up Web sites.
Pros: Mature, standards-based page and graphic design tools with dozens of RAD features; excellent support for non-technical users and those who work in a GUI environment; useful utility for printing to Flash and PDF formats; professional documentation.
Cons: Design-time support of ASP.NET server controls could be richer.
About the Author
Ken Cox is a freelance programming writer and .NET developer. He's a Microsoft MVP for ASP.NET. Reach Ken at .
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