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Web Design & Productivity
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium
5/29/2007
- Static content can now be placed into templates before Contribute writes them out to HTML;
- Contribute now has the ability to convert Office documents to PDF files.
And, just to round out the list of new features, here are some miscellaneous items:
- Contribute allows advanced users to add HTML snippets directly into pages;
- Media (rich or otherwise, including PDF documents and Flash Video) can now be added from URLs, instead of just locally; and
- IPv6 addresses are now supported.
Contribute CS3 isn't likely a huge factor in whether or not you'll upgrade your entire Web suite, so I'm not going to rail on its lack of new features. Really, where else is it going to go? It works well for what it does--I had no trouble connecting to my own Web site and changing pages, nor did I encounter any difficulty connecting to Blogger. I also liked the Firefox 2 integration, which allows you to dump out of your browser and into Contribute to edit a specific page or add content to a blog entry.
However, I did run into some issues connecting to various types of blogs. While Contribute connected correctly to and displayed entries from my own self-hosted WordPress setup, Contribute only displayed the first paragraph of each entry, which effectively meant that I couldn't edit entries or add new ones in the existing site format. I also couldn't connect to a Roller-based blog at all, either through Contribute's new auto-discovery feature or a series of custom URLs.
Overall, however, Contribute CS3 acquits itself well enough, though if you have a stable of earlier Contribute licenses and don't need explicit Universal Binary or Vista compatibility just yet, the new features on their own may not be enough of a reason to upgrade standalone versions.
The Verdict
Don't take all the harping the wrong way--there are a great many things to like in the CS3 Web Premium suite. Flash is a better-than-average upgrade, and though they weren't a part of this particular piece, Illustrator and Photoshop have been packed with new and useful features that belie their extreme maturity at this point. Dreamweaver and Fireworks both add some nice things, but the fact that those two products haven't been changed much is disappointing to say the least. I understand that bringing Universal Binary compatibility to all the products constituted a considerable development expense for Adobe, but that's an "under the hood" feature when it comes right down to it. It's more upsetting that Adobe seems to have forgotten that both Dreamweaver and Fireworks are taking the place of other Adobe-branded programs in the CS3 suite, and with this as the stated case, many first-time users of either product may have to struggle through adapting to what is now a non-standard interface (not to mention mixing and matching interfaces when the products are used together as Adobe suggests), and that detracts from the suite as a whole.
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