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The Macromedia community was unique. There was a synergy among developers, designers, marketers, and the Macromedia product teams that kept the product line alive and growing year after year. I say “was,” because Macromedia is now part of Adobe. Since Adobe acquired Macromedia, the community has gotten larger. Adobe did not previously have a reputation for fostering a community spirit, however, even though the Adobe umbrella is now over the entire former-Macromedia product line, the community has flourished and become even more pervasive. Adobe now feels more like Macromedia than even Macromedia did, because Adobe has somehow taken the best of Macromedia and made it even better. With that acquisition, we have one of the largest software rollouts ever—the CS3 release, which combined all of Macromedia’s biggest product lines with Adobe’s biggest product lines into one massive release. If it were a normal product release cycle, that would be big news by itself, but with all the major enhancements in most of the products in the line, it’s even bigger. Dreamweaver CS3 contains some great new features, most of which are covered extensively in this book, including the Spry tools, page layouts, and CSS tools. Dreamweaver CS3 (or Dreamweaver 9, if you’re counting) is the first Adobe version of Dreamweaver, but aside from the Adobe name and the Photoshop integration, it is instantly recognizable as the same great program.
One of the things that make the community great is the involvement of the company (Macromedia, now Adobe) with the designer/developer community. Adobe actively seeks feedback on products and welcomes give and take; it doesn’t just pay lip service to the concept of a developers’ community. The feedback forms on the website go directly to the product team, and product engineers contact customers directly. This kind of involvement brought PHP into Dreamweaver in the first place, and this kind of involvement keeps Dreamweaver at the top of the heap of all the web development tools available. To give an example of the Adobe community involvement, Adobe sent a team of representatives to meet with everyone at the recent TODCon convention, which typically attracts a small, closely knit group of Dreamweaver designers and developers. They didn’t just send a couple of marketing people or low-level operatives; they flew in over a dozen of the cream of the crop, including product managers, development team managers, quality assurance
managers, and others from locations in San Jose, San Diego, Romania, and Germany. On the first day of the conference, Dreamweaver product manager Kenneth Berger introduced the team, which looked like a wall of Adobe at the front of the room, and led a session about what is right and wrong with Dreamweaver, and the attendees of the conference got to give their input as to what Dreamweaver is doing well and what could be improved. There was plenty of praise along with plenty of venting that the product team will use directly. That
wasn’t the end of it though. The team was in attendance for the bulk of the conference, walking around with notebooks, getting valuable feedback that will help shape the next version of the product. This is the kind of personal contact that keeps the community and the product thriving.
Couple the company involvement with the extensibility of Dreamweaver, which keeps the development community buzzing with creativity by extending the program to do things that it won’t do out of the box, and you have a program that gets exponentially better with each release. I say the same thing every time a new version of Dreamweaver comes out: I could never go back to the previous version. I feel the same way about the latest CS3 release. I’ve never met David Powers, but know him well through the Adobe Dreamweaver community. He is a fellow Adobe Community Expert who freely shares his knowledge of the product in Adobe support forums, among other places. I know David by reputation as one of the most thorough yet easy-to-read authors on the scene today and as one of the most passionate and vocal Dreamweaver experts in the world. Among the scores of Dreamweaver books, David’s are the books that I personally recommend to people as the best. This book is no exception. Having written a few books in the past myself, I know it’s no easy task. As the technical reviewer of this book, it was frequently a challenge for me to find things to say about it—David leaves no stone unturned in his quest to provide the best instructional material on the shelves today. That is exactly what you are holding in your hands right now.

Tom Muck