One of the main improvements to Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 is better support for PHP-based content management system (CMS) frameworks such as WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. These CMS frameworks allow you to build dynamic web sites, and they are often extremely popular with individuals or community-based sites – in fact, the Media Access Australia web site is built with Joomla! This new feature allows you to design templates that work with these CMSs and see what your final design will look like all within Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.
Being able to build and maintain your CMS web site in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 will also give you access to all the inbuilt accessibility features that can help you design an accessible website: reference guide, templates, code snippets, and built-in accessibility validation tools.
The tight integration of Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 with Adobe BrowserLab enables you to view your web site and make sure it’s usable and accessible in different web browsers using Adobe BrowserLab. You can even compare different browser views side by side, or lay one browser view on top of another in what Adobe refers to as the onion-skin view. Adobe BrowserLab supports different versions of web browsers too, such as Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8.
Unfortunately, the free preview of Adobe BrowserLab will conclude on 30 April 2010. To get one year of complimentary access to all CS Live services including BrowserLab, make sure to sign up before 30 April!
For new users or even the web development novice, there are new CSS starter layouts. These starter layouts use the latest in web standards, so we hope that this will perhaps help new users who use these layouts to develop more accessible Web sites without even knowing it. The site setup process has also been made simpler.
There are more new features which Adobe has summarised by comparing the differences between Dreamweaver CS5 with CS4 and CS3 so you can easily see what else is new in the new version.
Adobe is yet to update its information about accessible from Adobe Creative Suite CS4 to version CS5. For information about accessibility in all Adobe products, visit the Adobe accessibility website for product information and resources.
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