9 replies to this topic

[ScottSalwolke]

I guess this is addressed primarily to webmasters. In addition to SEO work, I do web sites for a few clients. One of my SEO clients wants to do their site in Cold Fusion and wondered if I were interested. I'm curious as to how much difference there is between the two programs as far as learning to use them. I'd appreciate any thoughts.

[piskie]

Dreamweaver and Cold Fusion are not mutualy exclusive. In fact, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, Macromedia Purchased Cold Fusion (whoever they were) and many of the Tutorials around show examples in Cold Fusion with the differences pointed out for PHP and ASP.

Also Cold Fusion code (IMO) is simpler to understand than either PHP or ASP.

[chrishirst]

Dreamweaver has ColdFusion capabilities.

That is of course if you are happy letting it write whatever code somebody else decided was best to do what you want

[Randy]

I'm confused I guess.

Dreamweaver is basically an HTML editor. A good one, but just an editor at the end of the day.

Cold Fusion on the other hand is a server side scripting language, in the vein of PHP, ASP and the like.

I don't see how they're in any way similar.

[piskie]

Dreamweaver has built in scripting capabilities and will interface directly with your "Live Server" for testing. I use it with a C-panel Linux Server and it helps me create the Admin functions that insert records, update records, create temporary recordsets etc to build a full CMS from scratch.

christchurch is partly right, in respect to it's limitations but if you use it to create the basic building blocks, manual tweaking and customisation is relatively simple and allows a lot of creativity.

Like any WYSIWYG tool, you shouldn't just let it have it's head. You need to follow the code that it creates customising and tweaking it into the sensible zone.

[ScottSalwolke]

Thanks for the input. I think it's worth experimenting with it using Dreamweaver. At least to get familiar with it.

[ScottSalwolke]

Dreamweaver has ColdFusion capabilities.

Do I need to purchase a ColdFusion program or can I simply use Dreamweaver to develop the code?

[chrishirst]

Any text editor could write ColdFusion code

A CF database tutorial at sitepoint

[piskie]

With ColdFusion, the downside is the cost of hosting, check that out before you get too far into it.
C-panel hosting is very cheap these days and usually comes with PHP and MYSQL.

[athanasiusrc]

If you don't want a wysiwyg editor for ColdFusion coding, you can download Eclipse and the CFEclipse plugins for free. That's what I use and it works great.

Hosting for ColdFusion can be had very inexpensively. You can get a ColdFusion 8 plan with a database for under $30 a month from Hostmysite.com and with all the built in features that CF has (image manipulation, ease of coding, verity search, pdf generation, etc) you can easily make up the $20 a month you might save by going with a php host.

Before Macromedia bought ColdFusion it was owned by Allaire.

You can also download the developer edition of ColdFusion for free from Adobe and get SQLServer Express or MySQL for free so development costs are basically zero. Eclipse also can integrate version control software like subversion or subclipse which will help you keep track of code changes, again, for free.