After looking over the videos and information on the Adobe site the other day, a few things popped uot at me as great features in the new Dreamweaver CS3. Just to list my favorites here:

1. Spry ajax - This looks very cool. Instead of extensive hand coding JavaScript for very simple ajax functionality, this allows you to create almost a node/child-node ajax function with just selecting an XML file and setting the data source of a field. This looks easy to do and quick. I can already think of a few things I am going to try it out on.

2. Pre-Built CSS Layouts - Dreamweaver CS3 comes with an array of CSS templates. Not completed templates with text or anything, just CSS shells to start with. This should save a lot of time when starting pages.

3. WYSIWYG and W3C? Dreamweaver 8 use the Internet Explorer 6 plug-in for its design view, this was not the most standards compliant and created sloppy/bloated HTML. Now it is based on standards set by W3C. This should make browser compatibility much easier to deal with.

4. Integration with Photoshop - When Adobe acquired Macromedia; this was the first thing that popped into my head. I love Photoshop far better than Fireworks for image editing. More filters, better tools, just a better product. Fireworks has its uses for buttons and such, but to have Dreamweaver integrated with both will be very nice.

There it is, some of the things I am looking forward to when I get a copy of Dreamweaver CS3. I hope to get it at the beginning of May. Then I will make sure and post a review for everyone to see if it has lived up to the hype.

Being a PHP guy you need PHP to run locally on your computer for testing. If your not running Linux and are used to IIS, if you have just upgraded to Vista and tried installing PHP from the PHP installer you found out it just didn’t work so well. After tinkering and searching I have found a few tips on how to get it going, and I will lay it out step by step for you.

1. Intall IIS7 under the programs menu. When choosing components for intalling make sure and choose the PHP ISAPI component.

2. Download the .zip package of PHP 5.2.1 from here.

3. Unzip the files into c:php. Or you can unzip them into whatever folder you like to create.

4. Copy the c:phpphp.ini-dist file to c:windowsphp.ini. Make sure and change the extention.

5. Click Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

6. Under IIS go to Handler Mappings.

7. Click under actions click Add Script Map…

8. You should get a window like the following:

IIS7

9. Fill in the fields: (Request Path: *.php) (Executable: c:phpphp5isapi.dll) (Name: PHP)

10. Hit OK.

Thats it! If you are used to just using the auto installer with Windows XP, this seems a little more extensive but after you get used to the IIS7 interface it will become second nature.

After Adobe bought Macromedia there were a few questions out there. A few I had (as well of a few other designers and developers), were:

1. What would Adobe do with Fireworks?

2. How would future versions of Dreamweaver work with other image editors, especially Photoshop?

3. Would Adobe try to keep GoLive as a web editing tool? More importantly would they try to re-vamp Dreamweaver to keep the name and go for more of the GoLive interface? Or get rid of GoLive altogether?

I am still not sure of the first two questions, but for the latter I found the answer today looking around the Adobe site. If you look at the Products page you will notice there is not a CS3 version of GoLive. One, I guess, is left to assume it is going away.

I welcome this news as people got sucked in to going to GoLive and some sites are made exclusively with GoLive. Now I suspect people to start the requests to change their sites over to Dreamweaver. Also with searching around the Adobe site I looked at some of the new features with Dreamweaver CS3 and they look like they are on the ball. The WYSIWYG will be based on standards from the W3C and not based on IE6. Also CSS Advisor and the Spry ajax and widgets look like great tools. I look forward to developing with the new tools.