I've been using Dreamweaver off and on since version 2. When it's working, it's an amazing little product (assuming you like supposedly-WYSIWYG HTML editors) that provides all kinds of nice functionality. It's also more WYSIWYG than any other editor I've tried - although that's not saying much.
Unfortunately, this is a software package that has actually gotten worse as time has passed. The quality of HTML has been steadily degrading, and the style sheet handling is poor at best. You can apply styles to a text element that precisely match a style you have in your style sheet and you still end up with four new styles in the document itself.
But what really pisses me off is the poor quality of the FTP portion of the software. This has also been getting worse, not better, since version 2. In particular it is well-known to just stop working on its own one day and never work again. I actually reinstalled twice trying to fix it; the first time, Dreamweaver would not run after the reinstall. The second time it started running again, but still has the same problems with FTP.
I was trying to check out a file on the server, here is my log:
Started: 10/31/2006 3:20 PM
Connected to Web Site.
Operation timed out. Cancelling...
inc/file.inc - error occurred - Check Out failed since file.inc does not exist on the remote site.
File activity incomplete. 1 file(s) or folder(s) were not completed.
Files with errors: 1
inc/file.inc
Finished: 10/31/2006 3:27 PM
The name of the site and the name of the file have both been changed to protect the innocent, or someone like that. So I go fire up Filezilla and bingo! It connects, and I can browse over and see that file. Now, while that is the activity log, the following is the FTP log for the same period:
< 220 Gene6 FTP Server v3.1.0 (Build 70) ready...
> USER username
< 331 Password required for username.
> PASS
< 230 User username logged in.
> PWD
< 257 "/" is current directory.
> PWD
< 257 "/" is current directory.
Again, the login has been changed to protect someone or other. You can see from the FTP log that the only actions taken are USER, PASS, and PWD twice. There's no CWD, there's no DIR, there's no FTP commands that would actually tell Dreamweaver that the file is not there whatsoever.
So, I did a little searching in the Adobe knowledge base for "ftp", with the Dreamweaver product selected. This turned up a GREAT set of phrases that I would never use in a public document. To wit:
From Troubleshooting FTP Issues:
- When Macromedia releases updaters for Dreamweaver, the updaters usually fix some FTP issues.
Glad to know that you're so proactive. Too bad FTP is a relatively simple protocol that most people have figured out already. - The two most common alternatives to FTP are Local/Network and Secure FTP. Using either of these alternatives should provide better performance and stability than FTP. It's not that Dreamweaver's implementation of FTP is particularly bad—it's just that the FTP protocol is poorly specified in general, and server implementations can vary greatly from server to server.
Riiiiiight. That's why Filezilla (a FOSS FTP application) can connect to everything, and Dreamweaver can't reliably connect to anything. - If you're receiving an "Internal Data Error" message when trying to connect in Dreamweaver, it's likely that the server is down.
That's interesting. Most of us would use an error message like "host unreachable" or something else that might tell us that the server is down, and that doesn't look like a programming error. - Make sure that folder or file names do not contain spaces or special characters. Special characters include ? * - & ^ % $ # or any non-alphanumeric character. The underscore character ( _ ) is not considered a special character and is valid in file or folder names.
On Unix, those are all valid characters in file names (along with literally every other character) and my FTP client supports getting and putting them. Doesn't yours? Guess not.
I give up. From now on, I use a content management system, or I don't bother. As you might imagine, my favorite is Drupal, but there's plenty of other options.
Maybe sometime later I'll write a rant about how every Adobe product is going in the toilet.