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Reflections of an old school designer

Written by Marco Conti Tuesday, 11 November 2008 18:29

This is a very quick adaptation of a forum post I made on the Adobe Dreamweaver forums. After writing it I thought it contained some valuable info that others may find useful or inspiring. Read it with a grain of salt and consider it's initial intended audience.

I have been using DW with Joomla for the past 4 years (well, Mambo at first) and for my money it is the best IDE for Joomla integrators (the guys that don't write PHP full time) is out there.

My system is quite complex and you can go to my blog to read more on how it works. I have an old article for DW8 where my method is a bit rough around the edges and I am writing a new article that is going to cover DW CS3 and 4.

Essentially, I force a Joomla template to became a plain HTML page by doing a "view source" in the browser and saving it in a specific local directory in my DW site.

First you create a local site, save your files (especially the template folder) in it and connect it to the remote files.
After you save the HTML source locally, you link the CSS to your actual local CSS files in your active template and any changes you make will reflect on the live site once you push the CSS files to the server.

Naturally, I have a 100 small tricks to make the process as fast as possible, but the highlights are to install and use Firefox with some custom add-ons to speed up source and css editing and customize your DW shortcuts to make repetitive tasks faster to access.

You can also find a couple of DW extensions: one from media65.com and another from (I don't recall who, anymore) that allow you to edit your templates even more, as well as adding toolbar shortcuts for the most used tags.

What I like about my system is that while I use it for Joomla the most, it works just as well with Drupal, Wordpress and any other template based script out there. In any programing language.
I even use it to make PHP and HTML changes to the core files (or the overrides in the case of J1.5) and it streamlines that process as well.

I am not finished with my updated tutorial I linked above, but I will be soon. Check it out from time to time and I'll continue adding Joomla tips and tricks as well.

Incidentally, since I figured out this system, I stopped developing "static" websites all together. There is no reason for me to do support what I consider an outdated and inflexible system.

I can build a world class Joomla website with a custom template in about 3/4 of the time it would take me for a corresponding static site. Since I maintain a Joomla "Master" installation, creating a new empty site with all my best add-ons installed takes me about 15 minutes with Cpanel/whm. After that it's just a matter of placing a temporary template on so the client can enter their text (or I do it for them) and in the meantime I design the template to their specs.

Some folks claim that Joomla websites all look the same and give that as an excuse for not using it. Bull. That's a reflection on some Joomla developers not having the skills or the will to make sites that look different. I specialize in building Joomla sites from any design that a client can come up with. So far, I have not encountered a design I could not reproduce. The only limitation I ever encounter is the one all dynamically driven websites share: the content can vary from page to page so it is not wise to build design oriented websites that have any sort of fixed height. But even that can be circumvented.

Good luck with your endeavors and I hope this short extract from one of my forum posts was useful to you.

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