I’ve been trying out the demo for Artisteer 2 and it’s great. Creating templates for popular CMS softwares such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal have never been easier. I’ve done some playing around with manually creating a WordPress template and it’s not too bad. The WordPress documentation is fairly easy to follow. But doing it in Artisteer is a lot quicker. There’s 2 versions of the software, a home/academic edition that will create WordPress templates for $50 and a standard edition that will allow you to create templates for the other CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc) for $130. So far I only need the home edition since I use WordPress but at work we also use Joomla. I don’t normally create the layouts at work so I’m hesitating to buy the home edition. I have sent them an email to see if there’s an upgrade path from home to standard and the cost. My work will not pay for the software and if they do, it will take such a long time to get since they only purchase things through purchase orders (sigh).

Now I’ve been curious about Dreamweaver CS5. I’m currently using CS3 with Espresso. I rarely use Dreamweaver’s auto coding – it’s too bulky. I like coding by hand. Espresso is great for that and it’s lightweight and fast. It just doesn’t have the design view tab like Dreamweaver does. Adobe also has a student/teacher version of the software for only $150. I’m downloading a trial version now and will check it out. I’m curious about the CMS code “sniffer” that they have.