If you are the brave sort (and with a flick like "Zombie Hookers" in your filmography, you'd have to be), then you can use the "split" view and delve into the code. What you'll find may surprise you. Along with all the HTML tags and CSS selectors you'll see copious amounts of comments that will help you learn what the code is doing behind the scenes. This is a marvelous teaching tool and an excellent way to better understand how things are working under the hood.
In addition to the CSS starter layouts for newcomers (or those with a pressing website emergency), Dreamweaver CS5 provides even more robust options for the seasoned professional, including:
- Dynamic control of PHP-based content management
- CSS control, including visualization of the box model
- Better code hinting
- Integration with Adobe's BrowserLabs
Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla! are a few of the more popular content management systems (CMS). If you've ever developed a Wordpress theme from scratch, or even tried to customize an existing one, you know what a chore it is to find what you're looking for in the dozens of related files. That's where Dreamweaver CS5 comes in. Not only can you edit your CMS templates in Dreamweaver, but all of your related files are listed in the source code bar, allowing you to easily find and navigate through your site's structure. Say you want to change an element in the sidebar and prefer not to mess around with the related CSS file. No problem. Change the element while still in "Live View" mode and you'll see, in real time, how your site will look when you upload it to your host.
Another feature that will help speed up your development time is greater CSS controls. Since CSS elements are nested boxes, you'll want to ensure the properties that make up each "box", like padding, margin, and offsets, are consistent and relate well to other elements on the page. There are, of course, third-party development tools that will help you accomplish this (e.g. Firebug for Firefox is a popular option). But rather than resorting to a third party app, you could view the box model from within Dreamweaver's workspace. For example, while viewing your site in "Live View" mode, if you click the "Inspect" button and hover you mouse over various elements, you'll see highlighted "boxes" of different color form around each element, making it easy to see how the elements of a page relate to each other.
