I'm working on a website for someone. Turns out they want support for Dreamweaver Templates. I'm more of an Eclipse guy, and it seems like the only way to actually work with DWT is with Dreamweaver itself. Dreamweaver is not something I'm willing to shell out $400 dollars for, especially since I'll only use it for.... templates.
Is there any way to manually create and use Dreamweaver templates?
Dreamweaver templates are all based on specific tags in the form of html comments. If you research the different tags and their usage you can use Templates as well as Library items (.lbi's).
You could probably even create some auto completion rules in Eclipse.
I dont know if a list of all the tags and their uses exists directly but there is a perl module for generating them, although im not sure which version of DW its based on. But you might be bale to extract the various tags from it baring an easy to use authoritative document.
http://search.cpan.org/~whytewolf/HTML-DWT-2.08/DWT.pm
Actually now that i think of it... if they want you to take part in the build out youll need to find a library you can use in eclispse as an external tool or natively in order to simulate the various update features within Dremaweaver. That module might do the trick... if its up to date that is.
You can get the Dreamweaver CS4 template syntax by checking the following: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Dreamweaver/10.0_Using/WScbb6b82af5544594822510a94ae8d65-7a79a.html
You can make them into snippets and be able to add them to any page you're working with.
Also, I've seen a ColdFusion component that is supposed to parse Dreamweaver templates and it seems instances, so perhaps checking through it's code may give you more info on how to find and use the template markup: http://www.alagad.com/blog/post.cfm/dreamweaver-template-cfcs
Seem to me that since your client is demanding the use of Dreamweaver templates, that it would be easy enough to charge them for your purchase of Dreamweaver, and nothing comes out of your pocket.
You could go to their office and do the work there.
You could convince them to use something else, e.g. WordPress.