Hi all,
Newbie Dano here. Happy Sunday!. So here is my story in a nutshell. Im not a Developer but am a Website owner. I have been using Dreamweaver CS3 for a long time and its been working great. However its now on the cloud and very expensive, at least for us. Last year Adobe stopped supporting CS3 and I am concerned that it will eventually stop working all together and then I'm stuck .

So I have looked into CoffeeCup several times but have some concerns/questions.

I use Dreamweaver primarily because I can view Code and Design view, and also do a preview of my site before uploading changes to the server.

Also, the real biggy for me for using DW is its DWT, Dreamweaver Template which allows me to do Global Changes to multiple pages with one change. For example when updating the Menu bar etc.

Questions: How much of a learning curve would it Coffeecup be?
How similar is it to DW?
Does it have the ability to do Global changes and how hard/easy is it ?

Also, if I did purchase CoffeeCup, would I be able to try it out on the same computer that I currently have Dreamweaver on? or would it be a system conflict? I have Win-10..

Thanks for all your time and in advance for all your help and suggestions...

dano

Questions: How much of a learning curve would it Coffeecup be?

it is quite a big learning curve, but not too difficult if you are familiar with layouts & stuff.
& there are plenty of people here on the forums who can & will assist you with any help/questions you have

How similar is it to DW?
Completely different

Does it have the ability to do Global changes and how hard/easy is it ?
You can set up something called "symbols" in SDv3 (or earlier version) that is a global thingy, a bit like the 3 musketeers "one for all, all for one"

Also, if I did purchase CoffeeCup, would I be able to try it out on the same computer that I currently have Dreamweaver on? or would it be a system conflict? I have Win-10..

I have CC apps on the same computer as Dreamweaver, no problems, in fact, I use the FTP facility on Dreamweaver to upload my exported project files to the hosting server, In fact, (again), I do a final spell check with Dreamweaver over the whole site (something sadly missing in SDv3)

You can safely load CC stuff onto the same PC, You should give the( Free Trial fully working for(14 days ) a go first, but really my advice don't try make a fully operational working site during that trial, (except for maybe a single page) use the time to get that learning curve started, watch video tutorials, ask for help & advice on here.

good luck I am sure you will get the hang of it very quickly

Hi Dano,

If you are talking about Coffeecup HTML Editor, it has some similarity to Dreamweaver, but it is not the same. You can code and preview, but there is no 'design view'. If you are a coder and know your way around html and css, there is hardly any learning curve. It's just a bit of getting used to. It has global changes, that is a 'library' system, where you can store code or other page elements (typically header, footer, navigation) that you will be using on several, if not all, pages. You can also do a global 'search and replace'. I haven't used Dreamweaver for some 12-13 years, so I will not elaborate on the differences since I don't know them now. But you can of course have both the CC HTML Editor and Dreamweaver on the same machine.
Coffeecup also has a new 'flag ship', the Site Designer. I would perhaps say, it's a hybrid between 'drag and drop' and coding. You don't necessarily have to write code, but it is very useful to know coding. The learning curve is a bit steep, but once you master it, I don't think you'll ever look back. Anyway, download a trial version of both programmes and play with them. We are a nice bunch of people here in the forum, and if you ever get stuck, just holler!

Thanks so much for the feedback, much appreciated. I do realize there are big differences. What I mainly need is something to do edits to our existing site. So I will not be creating new websites. Most of the Edits are simple ones that I will need to do such as Text and Menu items, images, which is why I was asking about Global changes. I am somewhat familiar with html and can get around fairly well.

HTML editor as Inger suggested is the way to go then

SDv# would require a re-build of the whole site

ok well thanks for that info. One other question as I'm thinking ahead. Is the HTML Editor ready to go out of the box after I install it? meaning will I easily be able to open my existing PHP website with it and start to do Edits? or do I need to setup the Editor first in any way?

Thanks again...

It works out of the box. There are of course tweaks possible, but they don't get in the way of getting started.

great! thanks so much!