EW4 vs. Dreamweaver CS5: DWT Support

Question

I am currently evaluating EW4 - looking for an alternative to Dreamweaver. In short: Dreamweaver has been annoying us to death with unreliable performance, bugs that have been around for at least 10 years, etc. pp. 

Anyway, we rely heavily on DWT (= Dynamic Web Templates) and it looks to me that EW4s support for DWT is limited soley to Editable Regions. Is that correct?

Dreamweavers DWT implementation also includes Optional Regions, IF statements & variables, as well es repeatable regions and not being able to use these anymore would require some drastic change in how we build our sites. Anybody know if there is a way to use these "more advanced DWT features" in EW4 as well? Maybe I am overlooking something, or theres an extension/addon? 

Any input on this would be very appreciated.. Thanks!

 

Answer 1

Expression Web's support for DWTs is the same as the older Dreamweaver template format and uses that syntax. It doens't understand "InstanceEditable", conditional regions, editable attributes, nested regions or any of the more advanced features of the newere Adobe DWT format.

If you are on Windows servers then you can use ASP.NET master pages which offers comparable and in some cases superior features to Dreamweaver templates. I've found those more advanced features in Dreamweaver CS (okay Dreamweaver 8 and later) do tend to have more problems which is why I don't tend to use them.

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Answer 2

Thank you for your reply..

Unfortunately, we're mostly dealing with Linux (classic LAMP setup), but your advice is sound regardless. Maybe it is time to pitch DWTs for good.

Answer 3

Hi,

Sounds like you're one of the experts I should be asking questions of : )

I use Expression Web for simple publishing, though I'm typically using Visual Studio 2010 as an asp.net developer.

However, I made a quick site for a client with Expression and customized one of it's site templates.

Published, they love it, and my client would like to do simple content updates from time to time.

He uses DreamWeaver.

in DW, the .dwt means DreamWeaver Template right?  I understand that in Expression it's "Dynamic Web Template".

When/if he uses DreamWeaver, will it interpret the .dwt as dreamweaver templates and mess something up?

I'm kinda nervous.

thanks

David

Answer 4

What "DWT" stands for is meaningless. What matters is the region syntax used. The short answer is no, he won't mess anything up, as long as you are the only one working on the template file (e.g. "template.dwt") or as long as whoever does work on that file does not introduce syntax recognized only by DW into the template, to enable, for example, the advanced DWT features described above.

EW's syntax is the same as that used, IIRC, by DW MX or MX2004, and AFAIK, DW still understands it. Therefore, as long as the only DWT syntax used is that which EW creates and understands, and which DW understands, you should be able to round-trip between DW and EW without consequences. (Note that I haven't tested this since EW2, so run a quick test on a copy before risking production work.  ;-)

cheers,
scott

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