The Max Murdok Program

Template Generator for Joomla/Drupal/WP

Aside from being sick, and having a warped sense of something ( humor is objectionable ) I do like to stay on top of all things creative and nerdy. Recently I picked up a windows program ( supposedly porting to the mac soon ) called Artisteer. In effect, and for lack of a better term, a WYSISYG type editor/creation tool for Drupal/Wordpress/Joomla and a few others including straight forward HTML.

I have some opinions to share but what I like about this is, from a non-designer point of view, if you don’t have a creative bone in your body you can use this tool with most of it’s stock designs right out of the box, or right off the download and start creating half way decent CMS sites. That is of course not without it’s pitfalls.

Brief nuts and bolts of Artiseer.

Pro: It suggests designs and these designs aren’t half bad. You have control over every aspect, color, text style, buttons, shapes, and so on. It gets better as you dig deeper too. I see these features as being invaluable for Drupal users as it just seems, by it’s nature Drupal can tend to limit creative design without a bit of work. Artisteer does “simplify” this.

Con: But not really. Artisteer is always going to spit out a “blog like” template layout no matter what you do. You do get one, two and three columm lay out and the ability to change their position/widths. Regardless of what you want as a final out put, Joomla – Drupal – whatever, you do end up with something very WordPress-like. The reason this isn’t a full on “CON” and has some “PRO” to it is, this layout – the blogginess of the design parameters are generally what people want to do in the first place anyway.

Pro: Surprisingly this thing, Artisteer plays nice with valid code ( both CSS/XHTML ) I admit I am not as PHP savvy as I should be, I know enough to know what looks good or bad and what to fix. I wouldn’t ( and I’d be scared of anyone ) who would write code of any kind from scratch unless you’ve reinvented the cyber wheel as it were. Most things you need or want code wise have already been written and easy to find out there online. I did see that Artisteer has some PHP in the mix for some reason, but I can’t tell you why. It may have to do with Drupal 5 code and Drupal 6 code. Not sure, but the bottom line is that Artisteer does play nice with strict coding rules. Not something you see in a visual design tool like this too often.

CON/PRO: You still can’t beat a home made meal, and you still can’t beat an original Drupal, Joomla, WordPress design – bottom line. Artisteer does give Drupal a much needed creative design shot in the arm but that doesn’t mean it gives you creative freedom, you are limitd. It’s important to reiterate to anyone new to CMS tools and long time users of CMS’s that to call any of these programs design tools is a little misleading. You can’t really call these types of programs WYSIWYG but at the same time that’s exactly what they are so yes, I understand it’s a bit confusing. It helps, better yet, it should be required, that you know how Drupal/Joomla/Wordpress work before jumping in and making sites using Artisteer. You design and your sites look will evolve from Gimp, Photoshop, Fireworks – whatever you use. It’s feel, it’s usability – navigation and so on is controlled by how well thought out and planned your CMS is and that is truly where Artisteer can help. The biggest CON, since it’s relatively easy for ANYONE to start laying out a site in Artisteer that we’ll be over run with what on the surface looks GREAT but ends up being a cluster,….fooey,….as a template and you either waste your time trying to fix it or find another.

Bottom line, a great tool for a planner – a control freak ( like me ) and for someone with a history of CMS layout and planning. While perfect for a casual user I personally hope those are the last people to use Artisteer unless they use it to better understand CMS planning and layout. Eh, in a perfect world. You know what, here’s the deal – you WILL NOT be winning any designs awards with Artisteer but what you will do is create a some what original site in a lot less time for yourself or your clients. This is also a perfect tool for anyone starting a career in the field of web design or development. Most, not all, but most schools or training courses teach you traditional design using current technologies. Usually because they receive some sort of funding, or reduced costs to the school if the the school teaches stuff like .asp for example. While thats fine, Joomla and the others are open source and by it’s nature there is no funding coming from something that is free. So it’s really up to you the user to open the doors of open source. Yes Artisteer is NOT an open source product but it teaches you how to design for open source. The choice is simple really. You can spend thousands of dollars on different software to run a closed source server, or download free tools and have it do the same thing if not better. I guess it comes down to who you work for , what your client wants, or if you run your own business – if business is good, spend the money. If you are able to, learn as much as you can about the available options out there for you that schools, diehard developers, seminars, and so on learn them. Basically I like to say, you can lead a person to Open Source, but you can’t make them do back flips into it. They’d have a lot of fun doing so, but…..

I do have to add that I have NOT yet messed around with any code editing plug in or whatever once you create a site using Artisteer. So I have NO idea if there would be an effect. Based on experience I would bet there will be no effect what so ever, but before you do anything, save save save. Typically speaking I deactivate HTML editors when working with Joomla but thats just me – really depends on the site. But for instance, say you use WYSIWYG Pro. Being a 3rd party plugin, who knows what it could possibly do to code generated by Artisteer. I guess try for yourself and see.

I need, NEED to get back into Drupal again. For me, it’s more challenging than Joomla. I just love the available mods/comps/plugs. If I am to use, and I do on occasion, a WYSISWYG editor ( to get me out of a jam or help me remember code – I’m old and forgetful ) I do like JoomlaFCK. I am messing around with it on the new LIVER SUCKS web site. I do things like that to keep my head fresh with the technology and to stay on top of whats what out there in CMS world. JoomlaFCK is great altho, recently it was having some issues with Firefox 3.5 Until that’s resolved it’s not being used. As always I keep JCE installed always, it’s just a click away should I need it. Earlier versions, doing so would blow out my site, or the code, but it’s a nice little workhorse to keep in your arsenal should it be needed, or should you be lazy.

TinyMCE as well. It’s just nice to have a graphical way to get past a hurdle should one pop up on you. Back to Artisteer for a second tho. As with anything out there, see if it plays nice with your editors, your mods, your components and any plugins you may have. Artisteer is certainly a time saver but user input can easily throw the site into conniptions if you aren’t careful. Tread lightly at first with Artisteer, use it as a base and work from it once you have the template it makes for you installed. As you all know if you’ve mucked with any CMS, things can quickly get funky on you.

Hey look, a nerd post. First one in forever?

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