Forums | MacLife

Don't hate it, just have no use for it.

TextMate on the Mac, JEdit/Notepad++ on the PC.  SubEthaEdit for collaboration.

Dev setup : TextMate + Fireworks + server & browser.  Everything else is superfluous.  (oh.. and flash pro as required)

SubEthaEdit and Transmit keep me happy

Server-side scripting and templates.

Not necessarily.  I've never used Smarty.  I often ended up rolling my own templating system for small projects—though to be honest I really haven't created a website in a long time.

It doesn't have to be a complicated system.  Often I didn't need more than a header, footer, and navigation.

SubEthaEdit is ok—it's the main text editor I use on my computer—but I don't like it enough to buy the more recent version, and the last free version has pretty poor Perl syntax highlighting.

I'm starting to like Notepad++ very much for when I code on Windows.

I still keep GoLive around (ya know, that not-quite-as-good-as-dreamweaver program?) mainly for the ease of uploading that it provides - I can click on a single file 3 directories deep and tell GL to put it up and it puts it where it is supposed to go. That's nice. I'm sure I could get Transmit to do that, but oh well. I work on Windows at work so most of my hassle would be to find a nice FTP client that offers all that Transmit does, or use GL 'cause I have it.

As for coding I'm using Zend Studio almost exclusively now on Mac & Winders for long coding sessions and large projects. For quickies its either Notepad++ on Winders, TextWrangler or skEdit on Mac. TextMate is nice and powerful but I just never quite got the feel of it.

And who the heck put Miles in charge?

jb wrote:

How do you guys manage an entire site, if you just use a text editor like TextMate or SubEthaEdit?
What if you want to change the way the entire site looks, including <divs> and whatnot?

This is where you can save yourself lots of time.

I use PHP includes and put redundant content in it's own file.

A recent site I did has this type of structure.

<? include ("head.php") ?>
<title>Page Title</title>
<? include ("meta.php") ?>
<? include ("header.php") ?>
<div class="daisychain"><h3>Some Headline here</h3></div>
<? include ("upper.php") ?>
<div class="sidenav">
<ul>
<li class="active"><a href="brands.php">Brands</a></li>
<li><a href="rep.php">Representation</a></li>
<li><a href="agents.php">Agents</a></li>
<li><a href="news.php">News</a></li>
<li><a href="about.php">About Us</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div class="headline"><img src="images/brands.gif" alt="Some Alt Text" width="232" height="24" /></div>
<div class="contentbodyshort">
<h4>Headline Here!</h4>
<br />
<p>Bla Blah bla bla. Bla blah bla bla blah.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="one/section1.php">Section 1</a></li>
<li><a href="two/section2.php">Section 2</a></li>
<li><a href="three/section3.php">Section 3</a></li>
<li><a href="four/section4.php">Section 4</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<? include ("footer.php") ?>

See all those includes? They are parts of the site that are the same so I put the code in separate files so I only need to change it in one place.
I have a head file that has my doctype and html and head opener then the title is actually on this page so I can customize the title for each page. Then there is a meta file that contains all my general metadata. The I have a header file that contains the closing head tag and the opening body tag. It also includes the top graphic elements of my page as well as some basic navigation that I want  constant on all pages.

The include file can contain anything you would normally have on your page. You can also split up the code so you might have an opening div in one include file and the closing for that div in another include file.

See how this type of structure lets you focus on the content and not worrying if you fixed some tag on one page out of 800.

I also try to organize parts of my sites into directories so when managing larger sites it is easy to find things.

For me DW just gets in the way although sometimes I do use it when trying to work out a CSS issue or something where it helps to get fast visual feed back with different browser setups. A couple of years ago I tried to use DW to create a site where I used templates in the way that I now use includes and it was a nightmare.

With a text editor and an FTP client you don't have to fight the idiosyncrasies of an app like DW and you don't have to deal with the screwy custom code that it adds to your site.

Your code is your code. That's it.

Oops... nevermind on the FoJ... the page said you quadruple posted... but on refresh... you didn't.

If your sites are getting that big, or if you're doing web-apps when you should consider using a framework of some kind. It makes life much easier when you can just move the base code and have the base functionality of the site done.