After many battles with the quirks in the Dreamweaver API, code completion is now working quiet nicely. After trawling through the code hinting documentation, and getting some help from the Adobe team, it turns out that it’s actually not all that difficult to get working if you adhere closely to a prescribed structure. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘dreamweaver’
Code Hinting In The Dreamweaver Extensibility API
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Live *.ste Dreamweaver Password Encoder and Decoder
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009I noticed that a lot of the traffic currently going to this post is coming from people wanting to encode and decode passwords from a *.ste file online. You can now do this using the form below:
Dreamweaver Template Tutorial
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008I just came across a simple, well written tutorial on creating and publishing templates with Dreamweaver, posted in N.Design Studio’s tutorial section. This is 101 for most web design pro’s, but many people interested in Konductor still wonder how a lot of this stuff is accomplished within Dreamweaver. This article gives you a nice overview of what is involved in the typical design process in Dreamweaver, which should in turn give you a clearer understanding of the angle we are taking with the Konductor Dreamweaver Extension.
Of course a lot of the time consuming / technical / annoying stuff is made a little easier with the Konductor Extension 
Dreamweaver Goodness
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008I has been a little while since updates, but there has been a reason for that – I have been working hard! I know a lot of Konductor’s focus is on the AIR application, and for good reason, but the Dreamweaver extension definitely warrants some attention too.
I will post more detailed information soon, but here is what we’ve got working in the extension since the demo video:
- Automatic updates (this is an exciting one for me – big thanks to the Extension Manager CS4 team for making this super easy in the new version!)
- Menu management using standards compliant XHTML and CSS (again, this looks great in Dreamweaver CS4 as you now get the nice, accurate WebKit rendered previews for dropdown menus)
- Intuitive interface (if something is not right with your design, or has a chance of causing some problems, the designer is made aware of this and offered the likely solution with the click of a button – this is huge for new designers, as Dreamweaver can be a little daunting at times…)
Also, I’ve been working with the pre-release builds of Dreamweaver CS4 and Extension Manager CS4, and they really do add a lot of cool new features. To be perfectly honest, when I started playing around with the new Dreamweaver I thought it was just CS3 with a new skin, WebKit rendering, and Subversion support. But after using it, and especially after developing for it, I have found that it adds a lot of value. More on that later too.
Anyways, thats it for now. Stay tuned for more updates, there is a lot of exciting stuff coming down the pipe.
Encoded Passwords In *.ste Site Definition Files
Thursday, August 28th, 2008UPDATE: You can either encode or decode a Dreamweaver password using the form in this post.
I came across a little undocumented behaviour in the Dreamweaver API the other day. The Site.importSite() function (which will import a site from a Dreamweaver site definition file, or *.ste) expects the pw attribute of the remoteinfo element to be encoded… but as what? (more…)
Streamlining Dreamweaver – Part 1
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Most people who use Dreamweaver have their own way of doing things. We don’t want to force them to do something they don’t want to. Our goal in making a an extension for Dreamweaver is to be as non-intrusive as possible, but still make life a little easier. Here is one we are planning on doing that.
If you want to use Dreamweaver’s templating features, step number one is defining a “Site”. While it may not be obvious, finding the menu item to do this isn’t too hard. (Site -> New Site…)
However, I have found the setup process can be quiet involved. I did a quick test, and found out that it is a 7 step process to set up a site that allows you create your template, put it on a server, and test it out.
Here is a little screenshot gallery of the easiest, fastest way to do this in Dreamweaver (that I know of at least)…
The best thing about Konductor is that a lot of these settings either stay the same, or they can be worked out automatically. We know what the FTP server will be, and we can control how testing takes place. We can also work out some more advanced stuff behind the scenes once we know who the user is (like the FTP upload path and so forth). So we have been able to cut down this process to one step! Check it out…
I know this is a pretty minor thing, but it does save time searching through your emails for FTP settings, remembering FTP upload paths and so forth. I’ll post some more in this series about how we plan to streamline the design process in Dreamweaver, without changing it.
What The Heck Is Konductor?
Thursday, July 24th, 2008Well first things first, I’d better introduce myself. I’m Andrew Odri, a senior developer at a small software company called Konductor in Vancouver. I have worked with content management for while, and have worked with Adobe tools a lot. And here is what I have noticed…
Good web designers love designing web sites. And most of them use Dreamweaver. On the flip side, good designers don’t usually want to get bogged down setting up web servers, FTP servers, configuring Dreamweaver to work with these, and having to go through this process over and over just to edit some content at a later date. I guess that’s kinda obvious.
Then we have the clients of web designers. I’m just going to call them users for now. Users usually just want to change content, edit menus and add new pages. They know what they want to add, and they know what it should look like. In many cases, they want a new product page to look pretty similar to there old product page. What they don’t want is a big blank page with nothing in it. Or a scary interface that is just as complicated as Dreamweaver (*cough* Contribute *cough*). And they don’t want to bug their designer all the time just to make simple changes.
Anyway, those are some of the big problems I’ve noticed. Theres lots of little ones ones too. For example, does your user want to put a new photo on their site? Its 12 megapixels… So they either A) have to resize it themselves, or B) upload the whole thing to server. And what about previewing pages as you edit? True pixel perfect WYSIWYG, especially with custom designs, doesn’t exist at the moment.
Anyway, we are working on some tools using Dreamweaver extensions and Adobe AIR to get this right. We are actually really far along too. We have been working with Teknision for our AIR interfaces, consulting with Nitobi for our Dreamweaver extensions, and using our own expertise in this area to build the back end web services. We have them all talking to each other already.
We have a lot of exciting stuff post, and will be doing so very shortly. We are super excited about what we are sitting on right now – I hope you will be too!
More (substantial) stuff shortly…