Dreamweaver extensions for template design

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Design, Products, Template Design Kit |

How to eat an elephant! Tackle giant projects one bite at a time.

Its been a while since I wrote in my blog, taking on the challenges of getting the balance of the features completed for rapid theme and template development proved way more daunting than I had estimated. For years I’ve followed the same routine in design, MLS integration, and development of sites that hover around the open source cms solutions so popular today. Early on as I had mentioned in previous posts, the RTDS was designed to optimize a routine that makes mundane and redundant tasks almost instant. The idea naturally is to take things that are common to nearly all projects and group them into drop in solutions. When you get handed the task of eating an elephant, the notion you can do it in one or even a few bites would prove itself futile.

The way you eat an elephant is piece by piece in manageable sizes. Maybe this isn’t the best way to articulate a point, but as you read it may become a bit more clear because in our business each project can be as large as an elephant and just as intimidating. By creating the collection of Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions for template design (many to release GNU / GPL) I approach an elephant with a different mindset unlike other extensions I’ve evaluated. I spent a spank of time, energy and even money to evaluate the logic behind the approach of dozens of extensions. After many weeks of evaluation, I came to realized that NONE of the extension I evaluated followed standard design processes and even more interesting I found that most were basically a collection of code snippets designed for one click inclusion. It seemed to me that it was un-necessary for an extension to be built this way as most design professionals I have ever worked with maintain a Microsoft Access Database with their code snippets or they invest in tools like CodeWarehouse or SnippetBox to store their code. Dreamweaver is beautiful when it comes to storing snippets and managing common features but experience has demonstrated its not always the ideal.

If you take by example that I do no fewer than 25 - 45 WordPress, Joomla, or Open-Realty installs and configurations on a monthly basis it would be easy to conclude that I had little time for anything else. Each of these products requires an investment in time and certainly a lofty inventory in resources that can only be acquired with experience and time. What I’ve encountered more often than not is that each installation is pretty much the same as far as my plug-in inclusions and general setup configuration, so it becomes easy to spot the first hurdle in effectively maximizing time and project management. Individually, with modifications most of which are common, along with the install and configuration of SEF and SEO features, many times people ask how I can do so much for so little as my average price is just $25 per install. The answer to that is simple. I break things down into logical steps and maintain an accurate and up to date inventory of drop in solutions. This technique is not to different from the one I teach about in the RTDS for project design management. As a design professional, working any other way given the volume of projects we turn would prove extremely difficult if not impossible to maintain while still trying earn enough to pay programmers, hosting and other bills to stay in business.

I have no desire to work for $1 an hour and competing with foreign coders and designers, many professionals in the US, UK, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia struggle to stay in business as many times pricing is so cheap one has to wonder how its possible to avoid that very $1 an hour situation. For this reason among many others I created these Adobe Dreamweaver extensions and built a Code Freelance Open Bidding System for professionals who require a bit more CA$H. I’m not presumptuous or arrogant enough to attempt to limit the use of these solutions to only the west. I’m no bigot and for this reason, these Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions are freely available for ALL professionals regardless of nation. These Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions for template design are effective in reducing the mundane and tedious steps for effective layouts hopefully increasing your income as you can achieve more with less. As I mentioned above, most extensions I’ve evaluated were basically one click snippet inclusions which can certainly be time savers, but did not follow any particular design process. These extensions follow a design process as old as the print design process which includes the use of a grid system.

Now that my coder has gotten things wrapped up in the extensions I’ll update a section of my site so you can download, evaluate, bug test and freely use. Currently available are Open-Realty, Joomla 1.0.12+, WordPress and CRE Loaded with osCommerce, vBulletin and Joomla 1.5 soon to follow among others. Free is free and its my intention to keep them free.

Note: These extensions require a minimum of DreamweaverMX to work properly. Tested in versions MX, 8 and 9.

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1 Comment so far
  1. Pat Sims March 26, 2008 6:21 am

    When can I download this I visit your site at least 3 times a day hoping the downloads will be ready.


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