If you do any Web site development you should by now be more than familiar with cascading style sheets (CSS). If you aren’t one of the initiated, the cascading style sheets system is a way to style documents that gives you incredible power and flexibility over Web page look and feel as well as managing multiple rendering contexts such as on screen, print, Braille, projection, etc.
Animating CSS: DMXzone’s Advanced CSS Animator
If you do any Web site development you should by now be more than familiar with cascading style sheets (CSS). If you aren’t one of the initiated, the CSS system is a way to style documents that gives you incredible power and flexibility over Web page look and feel as well as managing multiple rendering contexts such as on screen, print, Braille, projection, etc.
Not surprisingly, the downside to this power is complexity. Not only does CSS styling get complex very quickly (the “cascading” part of the name refers to the hierarchical inheritance of attributes from style specifications in the Web page as well as from one or more external style files), it also has nuances and exceptions that comes from various browsers not complying with CSS standards (not surprisingly, the biggest culprit is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which shamelessly does its own thing and makes every Web developer’s life that much harder as a consequence).
Now there are some Web content development products that make dealing with CSS much easier. For example, Adobe’s Dreamweaver has a deep understanding of CSS and supports in-context CSS editing and interprets and tracks CSS styling.
Given what a great development platform Dreamweaver is, several companies have produced tools that add CSS styled features to Web page content specifically for Dreamweaver. One that I’ve recently tested is Advanced CSS Animator published by DMXzone.
Advanced CSS Animator is amazing. With it, you can animate most CSS properties including borders, colors, font sizes, position, and opacity as well as dynamically applying CSS transformations such as rotate, skew and zoom.
This Dreamweaver plugin includes preset animations such as fade in and fade out, expand, collapse, position in browser, paper spin, shake, and blink and you can combine animations in a queue to run sequentially and or simultaneously with timing and or easing. You can also create your own animations and save them as presets (see the features page) for a detailed run down of the product’s capabilities.
This is a great tool that will save you a huge amount of time when you’re trying to spiff up that boring Web page that your client won’t spend much money on. For just $155 you’ll look like the best value in the Web development business!
Web Content Editing Management: SnippetMaster
Again with the Web development tools: Do you need to give users the ability to edit Web content but don’t want them to destroy the Web site? There are quite a few tools that provide this feature but only one that I’ve found that does it really well and for free (although the Pro version of this tool is well worth the money).
The tool in question is SnippetMaster v2, published by the wonderfully named Electric Toad Internet Solutions Incorporated.
SnippetMaster, which requires PHP 4.3 or higher and either the Zend Optimizer or Ioncube Loaders to be installed on your Web server, is really easy to install.
Once set up you define editable “snippets” within Web pages by simply adding the tags:
… around the contents to be edited. Web pages can have multiple snippets defined as well as specify which users can edit which snippets and at what level (WYSIWIG or plain text).
Users access the SnippetMaster UI and log in to see the snippets they can modify … it’s that simple.
The Lite version is free while the Pro version starts at $24.95 for a single copy and the Pro Rebrandable version at $74.95 for a single copy (volume discounts are available). Highly recommended.
