Call me a pansy if you want, but I value my time, which is why I use Dreamweaver for a bulk of my coding and reserve hand coding for the smaller jobs. And to me, WordPress theme development is not one of the smaller jobs.

Dreamweaver WordPress Snippets Whenever I fire up Dreamweaver to build a new WordPress theme, the first thing I do is open up my snippets bar because that’s where my primary WordPress theme skeleton is housed along with some quick tag snippets. It sure does make theming fly by much more quickly than if I had to constantly re-type <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?> over and over again. :)

The snippets methods is a method that has served me well for quite some time, but I’ve just caught wind of a Dreamweaver extension that will make WordPress theming even more productive by adding a menu option for the theme tags. It’s called TAGStention and is compatible with Dreamweaver MX 2004 & 8.

TAGStention Dreamweaver Menu

You didn’t need to tap me over the head with a stick twice to test this out. The plugin was developed just under a year ago which means it won’t incorporate many of the new tags and hooks available for WordPress 2.3 and, unfortunately, the selected license prohibits creating derivative works, so modifying it is out of the question.

All of that said, it’s still a bit too early to tell whether this extension will be put through the paces, but I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. If you design a lot of WordPress themes, then it may be a good idea to download it and give it a try for yourself.

, ,