Something that has drove me crazy about Dreamweaver since I started using it a couple of years ago (after the greatly protested demise of ColdFusion Studio) is the lack of context help. As it stands now, I usually have 3 editing applications open while I’m writing CFML– Dreamweaver MX 2004 because it works well when developing new sites and has decent Visual Source Safe integration, HomeSite+ 5.5 for editing/viewing various pages as well as the CFML reference, and UltraEdit-32 when working in XML, and viewing/editing other types of files (I write Python in UltraEdit32 for instance).

Perhaps I can cut it down to two applications now that I’ve came across this Context Help Extension for Dreamweaver.

The extension will pick up any VBScript, JScript, ColdFusion, PHP, C#, VB, or HTML keyword that your cursor is on and find the appropriate online document at MSDN, Macromedia livedocs, www.php.net or www.htmlhelp.com.

One of the great features of CF Studio was the integrated help system. If your cursor was positioned on a keyword and you clicked F1, the appropriate ColdFusion help document came up. Dreamweaver MX comes with it’s own help system and reference panel, but we’ve added a Context Help menu item that goes a little further, by offering support for all the languages of DW MX.

I just installed it and tried it out on a few items and seems to work great– check it out yourself! Although, it looks like it’s opening the links in IE rather than my default browser, Mozilla Firefox.