CSS Editing Tools

Events happening in the community are now at Drupal community events on www.drupal.org.
jeffomac's picture

In my attempt to transition from table-dominated layouts to standards xhtml, I've had to more or less ditch the old workflow of slicing up images in Firefox and work on them in Dreamweaver.

For the time being, I'm doing it all by hand as most of you are as well...
So, using the right tool is key.

I came across a few good apps this week that I wanted to pass along.

Only local images are allowed.

CSS Edit

CSS Edit is a mac application that lets you.... guess... edit the CSS. :)
But that's all it does... so the software doesn't get bogged down with all the tools required to edit PHP or XHTML etc... it just focuses on the CSS... and in just the little bit that I've used it so far, it looks like a great time saver... especially for choosing colors and finding the right classes and blocks etc.
Check it out if you're on a mac.
http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/


Only local images are allowed.

FireBug

The Firebug Extension for Firefox

Another great tool is the Firebug extension for firefox. This tool does some tricks that I haven't seen in any other tool. I was just impressed with the layout and style inspector but it seems like it is meant to also debug AJAX and Javascript/DOM stuff.
You can move your mouse around on any page you navigate to and it highlights the css, javascript, or xhtml code in the panel below. Pretty cool stuff.
Worth taking a look at.
http://www.joehewitt.com/software/firebug/

Comments

For windoze, Topstyle is

sime's picture

For windoze, Topstyle is very good, although maybe you'd prefer the free "lite" edition.

As for using this stuff. I have to admit that a dedicated CSS editor is one-too-many editors for me. And if it doesn't have the handy doodads, like editing over ftp/sftp, then it just won't do. :-/

Yeah... I know a lot of

jeffomac's picture

Yeah... I know a lot of people that use Dreamweaver to just do it all... php, css, and even the wysiwyg editor... I'd just never seen a css editor with these kinds of features.
I also agree, I'd prefer being able to edit remotely and save back via ftp... sounds like a good app that you mentioned.

clarification

sime's picture

I might have given the impression that topstyle has the handy ftp doodads. I don't /think/ it does.

This doesn't have much to do with Drupal...

rickvug's picture

...so I am taking it out of the Design group listing to help the signal to noise ratio.

Firebug good, but doesn't save changes

SimonEast's picture

Firebug is great for testing small CSS changes and seeing them occur live, but not sure that you can save your changes anywhere, so its pretty limited for any heavy CSS development. (Unless someone can enlighten me.)

EDIT: Oops, just realised how old this thread was. Sorry for resurrecting it, but I guess CSS development apps are still an issue.

firediff

_vid's picture

@SimonEast You may have come across this by now but you can capture all those firebug css changes with the firebug add on: firediff: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=firediff&cat=all&adva...
You'll find your changes in a new firebug tab: "changes" (if you enable it).

Can someone help me with editing css in Dreamweaver?

herojig's picture

The files appear locked. Is there a way to unlock them without messing up drupal? thx!!!

Jiggy Gaton, Living in Nepal