For the longest of times, I’ve always considered Adobe’s, (previously Macromedia), Dreamweaver a beginners tool to web development. I always thought of it as a sub-par way of designing and developing websites. In all honestly, I still feel the same way.

But things have changed. I recently learned of a feature within Dreamweaver that allowed you to setup a “Dreamweaver Site.” This Dreamweaver function allows you to remotely connect to your server hosting your website, locally edit those pages and just as easily update them.

I had always found myself logging into cPanel and using its file editor to do my work. It was faster then downloading everything to my local test machine and then uploading it again. Yet, it was still slow and there were, (and still are), some rather irritating bugs within cPanel that made working with files all that much harder.

It wasn’t until a friend of mine mentioned Dreamweaver had the capability to allow you to connect and manage your websites in the way it does that I had decided to rethink my previous opinions on Dreamweaver. With a click of a button, I can quite literally edit my pages and as soon as I save it, those changes are made remotely on my server as well as locally. This kind of website management is extremely efficient combined with a popular FTP program such as FileZilla.

But that is just the beginning. Dreamweaver offers a check in and check out function which allows you to temporarily lock any files on your server while you are working on them. This is great in a multi-user situation where more then one person has access at any time to your server and your website. With this check in and out system, you can rest assured no one is editing your file at the same time you are, potentially overwriting your recent changes. Aside from that, another feature I found extremely useful, was the ability to load all dependent files. So lets assume you have your index.php page and on that page you include your header, footer and a configuration file. When you open the index.php file off of the server, Dreamweaver will actually detect these included or dependent files and open them along with index.php. This makes editing various parts extremely easy.

Not to mention, I have a terrible problem with making backups of my work. On too many occasions have I lost everything due to server rollbacks or crashes. Considering Dreamweaver saves your work both locally and remotely, losing something on my server is no longer a problem.

With that in mind, I will leave the rest up to you to discover. While I still feel Dreamweaver is a bad method of designing and developing a website, Dreamweaver, to this date, has offered me a means of managing my websites with extreme efficiency and organization.

Solely for this feature withing Dreamweaver, I highly suggest to other developers to take the time and look into Adobe’s Dreamweaver.