Dreamweaver CS6 New Features

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Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 What's New - from Train Simple

As you know, Adobe has released CS6 and Creative Cloud. With that comes a new version of Dreamweaver. Looking at CS6, for Dreamweaver there are some nice enhancements. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's a must-have upgrade, but certainly one that will benefit anyone embracing emerging standards. Some of the new features are a bit clunky and an obvious first attempt at brining a new feature to a product, while others Adobe has knocked out of the park. The core functionality in comes in the way of CSS improvements. A few popular new features include:

Web font management
A new transitions panel
Fluid Grid Layouts

Web Font Manager

The web font manager in Dreamweaver CS6 allows you to install fonts into your configurations folder, making them available to any site that you have defined in the program. By doing this it enables code hints in the code view for your installed fonts. You also have the ability to create custom font stacks bade on installed web fonts.

The downside to working with the web font manager is by default it will create a separate style sheet for each @font-face declaration. So it takes some manual clean up to resolve this behavior. Finally, web fonts are not supported in Design View. You will have to render your documents in Live View to see the web fonts.

Transitions Panel

I love this new addition. This panel seems to work perfectly and write wonderful CSS. Great job to the team at Adobe. This is by far the quickest and easiest way to create CSS-based transitions. It even creates browser-specific prefixed versions of all the properties in addition to the standard properties. The only complaint I have here, is if you wanted to create more advanced transition, you have to go into the CSS Rule Definition dialog box. That just seems strange to me.

Fluid Grid Layouts

This is one of those features that could have been knocked out of the park, but Adobe held back. I'm sure it had to do with timing, as Adobe did release CS5.5 a short while ago, and they did have to write the CS6 applications in Cocoa, so they only could do so much. It's not that this feature can't be useful, it certainly is, I just think future implementations will make this a must-have feature of Dreamweaver.

This feature allows you to work on a site in a responsive fashion. You can specify three fluid grids for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Each grid can have 2 to 24 columns, and you can control how they should span across the device's screen. 

This feature falls flat when it comes to controlling a styles. It's difficult to tell what query the style belongs to. Additionally, it doesn't support nesting elements, which makes it difficult to create more complex layouts.

Conclusion

All in all this a decent release of Dreamweaver, and these features are just a few. I should mention that the FTP client in CS6 has been completely re-written. It's a multichannel implementation, which means you can perform more than one server operation at a time. I find this to be a welcomed addition, as I like staying in Dreamweaver when developing. So it makes managing the site that much easier, and finally faster.

If want to learn more about what Dreamweaver CS6 offers, we recently released a new training title that reviews the new features of the program.