Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

I do!!!!!! I love dreamwaver even today, I'm surprised people don't use it, they have done an amazing job keeping it up to date - it's honestly a joy to use. Granted: I'm not a real dev/swe, just a dude who likes to mess around with webtech, still, I think "real devs" would enjoy it too, it's great to use.

I learn web on dreamweaver, I would make something on the front end WYSIWYG editor, and then "turn it around" (I called it in my head) and look at the "back of it" (I was a kid) - anyway, tables and frames and dhtml baby!!!!

Also: https://s.h4x.club/nOu445qL :) :)

I had to read the question twice. Dreamweaver was the go-to in 2010? I think it was already well on its decline by then.

At a new job in 2003 one of my first tasks was to generate new “heat map” code since the company was updating the background image file for 50-state map interfaces. Dreamweaver had the best interface for doing that work, so I got a copy and spent a couple days carefully tracing the 50 state outlines (which Dreamweaver turned into geometric shape code).

But even then, most of our sites were running on a database-backed CMS. By 2010 we were building sites in Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla.

I knew folks still maintaining sites with Dreamweaver templates at that time, but they were all legacy sites in academic and government jobs. Most of those types of orgs at the time still thought a website was something you built once and used for decades, like a building.

People keep telling me to use Dreamweaver but I stick with what works: FrontPage 98

An ode to Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver was how I learned MySQL back when I was 12-13 and got into web development. I don't remember how I came across it but somehow things, the way they were laid out at the time, made sense to me. This would ripple into a career that's making my living 16 years later.

I remember downloading XAMPP and installing it to get a local MySQL and PhpMyAdmin server. A few clicks in Dreamweaver later, I somehow had a connection file that would connect to my local MySQL server. I started playing around with it and creating different forms. The MySQL query generators on Dreamweaver were so simple that you could, with a few clicks, have a full on CRM.

I ended up coding a test score reporting system for my middle school class and the school somehow trusted me and started using it. This made me possibly the most hated person in the school because parents could now see their kids scores every day and there was no more "Oh the teacher hasn't given out the scores yet." But it was good times, and I was so excited about it.

Many years later, I now run a startup and have transitioned into using Node.js but MySQL is still my bread and butter. I still remember that day when I discovered the SELECT query.

I like dreamweaver. But I could still code html by hand with HotDogPro.

The one that I really miss is Macromedia Fireworks.

The perfect mix between vector editor + html editor + OOP.

And to think that it did all of that in the metadata of a binary format (png).

Nothing has come close.

I think the emerging meta seems to be using LLMs that will create HTML components for you from your Figma storyboards.

And also to let another LLM create your Figma storyboards from your novel design ideas.

And asking a third LLM to give you some novel design ideas.

Around the same time, I was using Coda actually!

https://web.archive.org/web/20101007013748/http://panic.com/...

I had only used dreamweaver a small amount at highschool, but the imac we had at home had a Coda license on it. While I don't think I could comfortably use Dreamweaver to make something today, Coda is possibly usable. Coda 2 since came out which I never tried, and now it's a new editor called Nova, which I was using for a short while but has strayed away from the style-focused Coda 1.x.

I would like to see that class of "make your own website" desktop editors come back, that bridge the line between dreamweaver and IntelliJ. Just a few core IDE features that make it not a pain to use, and just a few GUI features to make designing easy.

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Early 2000s Adobe was stacked with web technology. They knew where the world was headed, but didn't quite capture it the right way.

Flash, Shockwave, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Homesite, Fireworks, Coldfusion, Adobe AIR, LiveMotion, Actionscript 3.0, MXML, Flex.

They shipped so much software, it's incredible.

I still open Dreamweaver to use its advanced find/replace tool[1]. You can create complex conditions (eg. "find all a tags with class button and change the tag to button") which is super helpful when refactoring code or converting stuff. I keep thinking about making VSCode extension that has the same capabilities.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/dreamweaver/using/find-replace-text....

I was using DreamWeaver in maybe 2006-2007. I hadn’t thought about it in a long while. Back then we were CRUD web apps with a FileMaker backend and there was an integration where you could drag database fields straight out of FMP7 into DreamWeaver and it would automatically create the correct PHP (also 6 or 7 back then) code for your form.

I coded up a simple CRUD in Streamlit yesterday (needed a simple way for my Field guys to create professional looking PDF trip reports) but it still took me longer than that workflow used to. Our tooling really seems far behind where it ought to be. The whole time I was writing it, I was thinking why did I stop using PHP for stuff like this?

The last time I used Dreamweaver was in 2009 when I was putting together a site at a small business, my first job after college in a recession-hit market.

These days I know HTML/CSS pretty well, but do still use a DW-style tool to build simple websites without an IDE: Bootstrap Studio[0]. with a customizable barebones Bootstrap grid system under the hood. It's pretty powerful, GUI-based flexbox positioning, custom code support, split code/design view, SFTP upload built-in. I've used it to export an HTML design to flat files, and edit them in an IDE to hook it up to CMS logic, so there isn't any app lock-in or spaghetti code.

A new feature I really like is the "blog" function, where you can assign a folder to be the "blog", and the app will build an index page containing all those entries upon hitting "publish". The final export is all static HTML and CSS, so it's a way to upload to places like Amazon S3 and Neocities without the need for an underlying server-side blog platform.

[0] https://bootstrapstudio.io/

I think about Dreamweaver once a year, last time I used it was around 2004, I guess. The WYSIWYG way of doing things was an eye opener after using Notepad and manually typing tables from some HTML book. I later switched to PHP, MySQL and CSS, but I miss ActionScript sometimes. I made some cool browser games with it and it sparked an interest for programming on top of designing (try making a car steer correctly in a topdown view when math and stuff is not your strongest point).

Don't look at me, I'm still bummed that Navipress (which later became AOLpress) didn't survive --- though a certain Tim Berners-Lee did use it to write a book about the web:

https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Weaving/

Similarly, NVU and Amaya both went away --- is there anything up-to-date which will do web design interactively?

I had no idea that you could even still get a copy of Dreamweaver anymore, but a quick search seems to confirm that, indeed, you can still get it.

As a teenager I used to use a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, and it was cool but I eventually just learned HTML since I found that the stuff I wrote ended up being better than the stuff being generated by Dreamweaver, and of course that had the advantage of being legal and free. I'm sure that the HTML exporter has gotten a lot better since 2005, but I have moved as far away from web development as I could since then because web development is terrible.

A small part of me wants to try the latest Dreamweaver now but I don't have a Windows or Mac computer anymore.

Dreamweaver confused? It was a drag & drop & point & click web builder; what was confusing about it? There are many similar tools now, free and paid, haven't heard about Dreamweaver in a long while, so while I don't understand the confusing part, I am very curious if anyone is using it still. I do see it is still sold (and maintained?).

I can’t imagine anyone is still using Dreamweaver—that market must have been utterly subsumed by Squarespace. If you are a, say, small business that needs a 3–5 page marketing site with contact info and about pages, surely it makes more sense to use Squarespace (or wix, or what have you).

But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.

Adobe sunsetted that project, but it still apparently somewhat lives on, in the form of Phoenix Code. (https://phcode.dev) And it still does look very “designed” in comparison to VSCode. I really like the default typography, tag highlighting, and some of the details of the text editor itself.

Ah, the nostalgia. Dreamweaver was pivotal for me in my early teens to be able to copy other sites code to see how things were built out and learn HTML + CSS.

If I remember correctly, it was really the only way to go to make image maps when those were a thing.

I still cant believe what Adobe did with Flash.

I remember feeling like a power user upgrading from Frontpage 98 to Dreamweaver and being able to hot swap between code and the live view. Dreamweaver rolled a ton of then-groundbreaking features into a great interface.

No, but I actually named my company's flagship software "Laneweaver" (logistics industry) as an homage to what once was a great product.

Adobe will probably read this and sue me.

I started with Dreamweaver in 2001/2002.[1] In between, I used Utradev for a while. However, I gave up Dreamweaver soon enough for TextPad as I used to write a lot more ActionScript; one editor for all was easier for me - so, HTML, CSS and JavaScript all in TextPad.

Then, I used a combination of Coda and BBEdit for a while. I remember writing the Sass.Mode for Coda, which was later taken over by Panic and included as part of Coda 2.[2]

Edit: Now I remember why the change. I moved to a Mac ecosystem from Windows in 2006.

By then, I had already moved on to Sublime Text around 2008/2009/2010. I don’t code much these days, but Sublime Text is still my go-to for its speed and the ability to open large codebases or an entire drive and let me edit things around.

Dreamweaver was a good dream. I’m going to spend the next 10-20 years learning Vim slowly and making it my retirement IDE.

1. https://brajeshwar.com/2002/dmx-inc-files/

2. https://brajeshwar.com/2012/coda-2-comes-built-in-with-sass-...

AFAIK Dreamweaver generated classic ASP code. And while Microsoft continues to downplay it, classic ASP code still runs on Microsoft IIS:

https://www.geoplugin.com/resources/classic-asp/#History_and...

I guess they worked out all the bugs!8-))

I am volunteering in a school library and someone „built“ their system with Dreamweaver and FileMaker. It’s still in use on an airgapped winxp machine.

I learnt to code in the mid-to-late 00s so have very fond memories of Dreamweaver given a lot my first web projects were heavily reliant on it. I also used it in college around that time.

I moved away from it pretty quickly because I stopped using the visual designer in favour of HTML and also started writing PHP so as an IDE it wasn't ideal.

To be honest I'm kind of surprised anyone is still using it... There's a lot of great web WYSIWYG editors out there now and most websites people might want to build can be more quickly and more professionally be built on the back of services like Shopify.

I'd do anything to go back to those days building silly websites with Dreamweaver though. The web was so exciting back then. A lot of the content online really was just people sat there computer playing with Dreamweaver and working things out. You don't really get that anymore (apart from a few homemade blogs posts here).

I stopped using it ages ago but I still use its HTML code colour scheme into whatever code editor I use, nothing else feels right.

No, no one is using it. It never was a go-to tool even back then. I feel old by just remembering it.

Dreamweaver solved no one's problems.

1) Regular users didn't need it: they couldn't use it for publishing their web-sites anyway. They quickly just switched to social media for publishing their content.

2) Dreamweaver was not a great tool for professionals too. Its code editor was not convenient and overall the program felt really poor in features. It never could catch up with new features of web. Besides, no one creates whole pages and Dreamweaver didn't support dividing a page into parts like header, main part, menu, articles footer etc, as far as I remember. This would be a way too much complicated task to implement.

So it was just a tool for students. If you were learning HTML, it was a fine tool to learn it. That's it. It was never used in real work.

The name "Dreamweaver" is really cool though, I must give them credit. It sounds even way too cool for such a simple program as it was. It should have been used for an iconic film or a video game instead.

Unexpected bottom line: do we need something like Dreamweaver which wouldn't suck? Yes. Figma got so successful because it allowed creating prototypes and was solving real life problems. Now a new program like Dreamweaver could solve the problem of quick prototyping and generating HTML code for something like React components.

Would it be a complicated app? Yes. Would it require a lot of programming? Yes. Would it immediately bring money? No. So currently it's probably won't be a good idea to work on it.

You can create something like a visual editor module for HTML pages or react components to be used in modern IDEs. Maybe even just by embedding a non-read only WebView with some cleverly butchered developer tools and sell that module to companies for a cheap subscription.

Wow, I was taught Dreamweaver on a college course in the very early 2000s but I have never really seen it used professionally.

In 20+ years of employment I think I came across one developer who used it, and that was probably in 2005 or so!

Find it hard to imagine what kind of team would use it for development today.

While y’all are here… What’s the best website builder out there?

Something that you can deploy as raw html/js/css on a domain/site you own and operate?

Something like Squarespace/wix etc but where you edit locally and own the content… (these and official WP afaik don’t allow this)

I probably tried to use a pirated version of Dreamweaver.

But I loved HomeSite.

https://nick.typepad.com/blog/2009/06/homesite-discontinued....

When Dreamweaver integrates GPT4o it will finally reach mainstream. I can imagine the podcast ad-spots already. Watch out SquareSpace. Disruption comes for us all.

(P.S: I did use Dreamweaver in the early 2000s. It was great. I’m surprised it still is running! RIP Fireworks)

I heard recently during the big government purge that a lot of the actual mechanics of that purge functioned by revoking people's Dreamweaver licenses, and that a lot of .gov websites run on Dreamweaver. Probably the US government is singlehandedly keeping Dreamweaver alive through large annual contracts for new features. I don't have any concrete sources on this, it was just Twitter gossip, but it makes a lot of sense to me—Dreamweaver provides the ability for non-technical government employees to edit the site, low system requirements for the servers, and presumably enough Enterprise features to ensure template homogeneity across an org as large as USG.

I started making a website on Dreamweaver back in 2020 when I was just starting to learn programming. I think the website is still up: http://acunia.com.ar/leon

Haha, Dreamweaver is really quite a character. I was also tossed around by it at first. But later I found that mastering its shortcuts was like opening a whole new world. Have you ever tried to dig out these little tricks?

I would love to see something like Flash come back. HTML5 isn’t the same thing, and killing flash seems like it was a coup for Apple’s App Store and Google’s control of browsers more than anything.

For JavaScript dev, even the latest version is useless in 2025. But it is a cool novelty and should be protected at all costs. Especially personally considering my mom and dad used it before.

I am still on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HoTMetaL

I have used both Frontpage and Dreamweaver. I currently use the vintage open source html editor Kompozer.

Weird quirk I inherited from Dreamweaver: I used a bootlegged/trial version in high school to learn coding and it would close itself every few minutes so I would Ctrl+S every few seconds to save my progress. I still do that to this day even though all my Jetbrains IDEs auto-save. I think I still have my webassist.com PHP extensions for Dreamweaver somewhere on my hard drive from 2008.

I miss AOL Press! It was really phenomenal software.

In a related not I still can't believe putting tags in ALL CAPS didn't win the style war.

I loved dreamweaver when starting out. Never got on with the WYSIWYG (hence moving on), but its ability to read your CSS file and suggest classes was great. MX was the pinnacle in early 2000s.

More relevant to me though, I miss Fireworks so much. Nothing comes closer. Figma is great but web based and already shown willing to sell out everyone who trusts them.

I hardly see it mentioned in these types of threads but I started making my first websites with Microsoft Publisher. It was essentially geared toward people who were used to creating newsletters and posters/fliers. It came with our copy of Microsoft Office 98 and it was a lot of fun to play with as a kid.

I got my (professional) start with it but very quickly grew out of it when I got a job working on real websites. But I do have fond memories of its editor. To this day I’m still confused how their built in scripts were supposed to work, especially their auth flow.

My first real editor was Netscape Composer.

Ah the good ol' days of Dreamweaver on my Windows XP machine

+ WinAmp

+ Custom XP skinz

+ Gamespy

+ Hamachi + Xbox Connect

+ Notepad++

+ Filezilla

+ Hosting sites on dot.tk or 000webhost for my Xbox clan

Not dreamweaver, But I use Flash (Macromedia) on Windows and Adobe on Mac frequently.

Call it muscle memory, I find it easier to cook a chart, shape and basic resize/crop on Flash.

I remember unmessing webpage layout from the dreamweaver generated html by hand so it could be templated for the actual website on my first job. Never again!

Not me, I wish I could take back my college $ on courses that used extensive Dreamweaver and Flash. I guess we can't predict the future.

I still use it when I have to update my website.

I have a friend that's been using Dreamweaver for decades. He still maintains a handful of client sites with it.

Yes. I have to run it under Wine on Linux, but my paid-for version of Dreamweaver 8 still works fine.

This brings back memory. Definitely a go-to at that time and nothing better. A different era.

I actually still use DW when I want to convert a giant spreadsheet into a table easily.

Cursor is the new Dreamweaver

My dad does. He prefers older versions though (and he switched from FrontPage)

What the original SSG? Not anymore but it was great for its time.

I use it for FTP and (child) template editing for Wordpress sites.

Dreamweaver? Who remembers Drumbeat 2000?

There must be a successor, right?

Notepad was even better than dreamweaver. Never touched it and was taught to stay away.

Dreamweaver, now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time, I remember using it in highschool to build websites during a web design class. I always thought it ended up being discontinued by Adobe and replaced by various web frameworks, but maybe I'm thinking of Microsoft Frontpage

My uncle probably

What a strange post. Anyone using Frontpage or Mosaic?

Spry assets

This is a question. What is your real question? Are you looking to build something now?

Nobody uses it to build anything professional, it's a cute toy