If you’ve never used Dreamweaver before, see Chapter 1 for the grand tour. If you’re upgrading from Dreamweaver CS3 or some other version, you’ll find that Dreamweaver CS5 offers a host of new features.
CSS improvements. Each version of Dreamweaver provides more refined tools for creating, editing, and testing CSS. This version is no exception. Dreamweaver CS5 now lets you temporarily turn on and off the individual CSS properties for a style—this useful testing feature means you can quickly see the effect of a particular property on a style. In addition, the new CSS Inspect tool lets you hover over areas of a page and visually identify normally invisible style properties, such as padding and margins, as well as see which styles affect the HTML tag the mouse is hovering over. This feature is great for quickly identifying how CSS affects elements on a page—a useful task for fine-tuning your styles or trying to figure out why a particular element looks the way it does.
Simplified site setup. Naturally, setting up a site in Dreamweaver is a critical task. In previous versions of the program, this process was called “defining a site” and it’s necessary for making sure Dreamweaver correctly handles links, can upload files to a web server, and for taking advantage of the program’s many site-management tools, such as Templates and Library items. Setting up a site is sometimes confusing for people new to Dreamweaver, so Dreamweaver CS5 simplifies the process by asking only for the information needed to get a particular task done—now, the program makes it clear that to get started with a site, you just need to provide two pieces of information. Only when you get to more advanced tasks, like uploading files to a web server, does the program ask for additional information, such as the address of your web server and the username and password you use to connect to and upload files to your site.
Enhanced CSS starter pages. CSS-based layout is a challenge. It’s not as intuitive as a page layout program such as InDesign, and it often involves knowing how different browsers react to CSS. Previous versions of Dreamweaver came with “CSS Starter Pages”—complete HTML and CSS files for the most common types of page layouts. However, the CSS for these pages was often confusing to those new (and even some not so new) to CSS. Dreamweaver CS5 introduces new Starter Pages that provide the same layout as those in earlier versions, but use much simpler CSS, meaning it’s easier to understand how the pages work and how to modify them so they look the way you want them to.
Adobe BrowserLab integration. Adobe’s BrowserLab is a great service for testing your web pages in a wide variety of browsers. One of the challenges of web design is creating pages that look the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome. BrowserLab provides screenshots of your page in different browser so you can identify display problems—if you don’t have access to both a Mac and Windows computer, running lots of different web browsers, this simple service can really speed up the testing of your web designs. Dreamweaver CS5 now puts a BrowserLab control panel directly inside the program, so using it is as easy as choosing File→Preview in Browser→Adobe BrowserLab.
PHP coding improvements. Adobe put a lot of work into make Dreamweaver CS5 a great tool for PHP programmers. Support for PHP Code Hinting (meaning Dreamweaver can make writing PHP code faster by suggesting code as you type) as well as Site-Specific Code Hinting are great productivity boosts to serious PHP coders.
And more. Dreamweaver CS5 features lots of other little tweaks and improvements under the hood, including fixed bugs that plagued early versions; a new spell-check library with a wider range of support for different languages; support for the file version control system Subversion 1.6 and lots of improvements to Dreamweaver’s basic Subversion support; and Live View navigation so you can actually click through your site right within Dreamweaver to preview pages.
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