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One Last Thing: DWT + LIB support, pretty-please?
The one killer feature Dreamweaver has that Coda lacks is its Dreamweaver templates and library files. Nobody other than Adobe supports both. Microsoft Expression Web gets close, with its "DWT" support (they call it "Dynamic Web Templates" instead of "DreamWeaver Templates") but Microsoft didn't implement the simpler, older, yet still prevalent DreamWeaver Library files. Templates and Library files are used to create and update static content that appears on many pages. Templates are more advanced, as where you add library files for navigation and such to parts of existing HTML pages, you can instead create new pages *from* templates, and edit only the parts that differ between pages.
(Image from designplace.org DWT tutorial)
Both are based on special comments that reference the file relative to the "site". Dreamweaver will look for templates in a root "templates" folder, and library files in a "library" folder. When it updates and applies templates and such, it is by default configured to rewrite the URLs so they are updated from "../index.htm" to "index.htm" - e.g. if you open a .dwt file in a templates folder in your browser, the links will work. When you save the .dwt and it prompts to update all other files that use it, during that process it knows to rewrite the URLs in the .dwt so they still work after being applied.
This is the one last feature stopping me from switching editors. Where I work, at York University, everyone has PCs and there's a huge amount of legacy content that uses Dreamweaver Templates and Library files. In part, we use Templates because we've been giving copies of Contribute to faculty to update their pages. (It also makes it MUCH easier to edit a multi-page static HTML webpage)
Outside of templates, I can't think of any reason to stick with DreamWeaver. I suspect there are quite a few web developers like me out there. I would have switched earlier to TextMate, except it doesn't support DWT either, iirc.
So what are the chances both might have basic integration?
Key for me are shortcuts/buttons/autocomplete (somehow) to add the comment tags for editableregions, and updating pages based on library or template files automatically. Finally I'd add support for creating pages from templates, but that's third on my list, as you can, if you wanted to, manually do so. Just find-and-replace the instances of "TemplateEditableRegion" etc. to "InstanceEditableRegion" and at the top of the file, tell the update code which template this file uses. I couldn't care less about repeated editable regions or anything fancy, as nobody takes the time to use them and the one time I tried to use them in Contribute, everyone was confused by the add/remove button placement at the bottom of the table.
By the way, this is an amazing support system. Everything is the way I've always wanted a discussion/community/chat thing to work. Wow. Talk about great use of AJAX. If only it was open source ...
(Image from designplace.org DWT tutorial)
Both are based on special comments that reference the file relative to the "site". Dreamweaver will look for templates in a root "templates" folder, and library files in a "library" folder. When it updates and applies templates and such, it is by default configured to rewrite the URLs so they are updated from "../index.htm" to "index.htm" - e.g. if you open a .dwt file in a templates folder in your browser, the links will work. When you save the .dwt and it prompts to update all other files that use it, during that process it knows to rewrite the URLs in the .dwt so they still work after being applied.
This is the one last feature stopping me from switching editors. Where I work, at York University, everyone has PCs and there's a huge amount of legacy content that uses Dreamweaver Templates and Library files. In part, we use Templates because we've been giving copies of Contribute to faculty to update their pages. (It also makes it MUCH easier to edit a multi-page static HTML webpage)
Outside of templates, I can't think of any reason to stick with DreamWeaver. I suspect there are quite a few web developers like me out there. I would have switched earlier to TextMate, except it doesn't support DWT either, iirc.
So what are the chances both might have basic integration?
Key for me are shortcuts/buttons/autocomplete (somehow) to add the comment tags for editableregions, and updating pages based on library or template files automatically. Finally I'd add support for creating pages from templates, but that's third on my list, as you can, if you wanted to, manually do so. Just find-and-replace the instances of "TemplateEditableRegion" etc. to "InstanceEditableRegion" and at the top of the file, tell the update code which template this file uses. I couldn't care less about repeated editable regions or anything fancy, as nobody takes the time to use them and the one time I tried to use them in Contribute, everyone was confused by the add/remove button placement at the bottom of the table.
By the way, this is an amazing support system. Everything is the way I've always wanted a discussion/community/chat thing to work. Wow. Talk about great use of AJAX. If only it was open source ...
I’m only slightly annoyed that I'd still have to switch between this amazing program and Dreamweaver when applying the template's changes and setting up such files.
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Inappropriate?Thanks for the suggestion.
It's a request that does come up every now and then!
We're trying to weigh the implementation effort (it would be huge!) versus the benefit (how many of our users actually want this?). It's also a little interesting, since it's doing something in a static way that could probably be done much better using a dynamic site / a content management system / even server side includes.
But we'll definitely count your vote -- and listen for others!
Thanks for your interest in Coda.3 Comments
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This is one of the best points
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Sometimes a dynamic site is overkill. If you have a really simple site with content that doesn't change to often, plain HTML files often do the job well enough.
Also, these days you can see the emergence of small “Light” CMS (Unify, CushyCMS) that simply work with plain HTML-files on the server. A website authoring app that supports templates would be a perfect fit for this.
Post on CSS-tricks regarding emerging “Light” CMS: http://css-tricks.com/the-light-cms-t...
And thanks a lot for producing such a wonderful application! -
Great link, Torbjørn, thanks! And yes, I think the idea here is that Coda could become a CMS tool for web designers, for instance. Though SSI and so on performs a similar function.
In my case, the request was driven out of backwards-compatibility with existing content done in DreamWeaver. To be honest, I don't work in that department at York anymore, so I could currently care less if DWT support arrives ... but I do think creating a CMS aspect within Coda sounds intriguing. :-) -
I didn’t mean that I think Coda should become a CMS, but that with these CMS’s that simply work with plain HTML(and no databases or dynamic templates) having Coda being able to use DWT-templates is a good fit.
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Inappropriate?It appears I'm not the only one wanting a non-DreamWeaver template solution. Judging by the browser in the screenshot, I would say that "Simple Templating Tool" is ancient, but it does seem to do a similar job. Perhaps you could steal some implementation ideas from it: http://stt.sourceforge.net/stt.html
Oh that's interesting. This says it was updated in 2003 and written in Perl: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stt
Note too that the above doesn't specifically state its DreamWeaver compatibility, except to say that: If you use DreamWeaver to edit pages created with STT it will prevent you from making page changes outside of editable regions. (But if you have DreamWeaver, you probably don't need STT!)
So that implies a certain amount of DW-STT compatibility. Of course, I'm not sure how it handles relative links, as mentioned in my original post above.
I’m happy to get a response so quickly and eager to help =)
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