Ok, after playing around with CSS Edit for a few minutes I quickly came to the conclusion of buying this app and did so. This will be a huge time saver for me to modify existing drupal themes and maybe create my own if I dare go there. Very cool indeed.

You might want to check out firebug for you analysis of sites. It's pretty darn powerful and free.

Personally, I use a few things to build sites and analyze sites. To analyze sites I use firebug. For a text editor I use textwrangler. It is free, can read and save to ftp servers, and does all that fancy code highlighting in different colors. The big bonus in this program is the amazing search and replace features.

For any code development I use eclipse with some plugins like the phpeclipse plugin. This is a full IDE and has all the functions to go along with it. And, it's free, too.

I wonder how this compares to these. I am all about legally free these days. If I can learn to use the legally free things well I can show others how to use them, too.

Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.mattfarina.com

It rocks. The xray feature is unbelievably helpful, and the one-click w3c validation saves a lot of time. I use it constantly. Combine it with a good ftp client and you can even make minor edits directly to your live css simply by change-preview-save=auto upload, in a pinch.

I second Matt's comments about Firebug, I'd be lost without it. While it's useful for some trial and error modifying of CSS I actually prefer Web Developer's CSS Editor for more significant tweaking.

For text editing (I'm in the Windows world) I use Notepad++ . I also use Notepad++ as the external editor for FileZilla to quickly make simple changes "live," especially when developing a site.

Curt

I'm curious if anyone has used the CSS editor called Stylizer in developing drupal sites?

http://www.skybound.ca/stylizer/

I'm with Matt and Curt. Firebug, FireFTP and Notepad++ are great tools. You might also want to check out Aptana which has a lot of free add ons that allows for coding PHP, AJAX, Ruby, Python and more.

Thanks for the mention of textwrangler, I was looking around for a better text editor on the mac. :-) I agree, if I can do it with a legally free tool, then I can help more people, many whom say "I don't have the budget".

I have repeatedly read how great CSSedit is supposed to be, I bought it, and I have repeatedly failed to make it work. FireBug can't help me with complicated selectors on live pages ad I am hoping to use CSSedit for that:

The biggest problem is when I need to check and tweak a live, running Drupal site, the preview feature never shows me what the site actually looks like. As far as I can tell, it leaves out the "dynamic" elements of any given Drupal node or page. So if I have to style some page and all I get is the body text without any images, CCK fields and so on ... so this isn't very helpful.

Maybe I just don't know how to set it up? Maybe I have missed the whole point? I would really appreciate wisdom from those of you who can make this baby fly.

... help?

Hey everyone,

I install the Firebug plugin on Firefox way before I even knew what it was for. And I kept seeing all the wonderful comments about Firebug, and just never saw what the big deal was.

Then I finally played with it out of curiosity, and a section lit up! I nearly fell out of my chair! Yes, the revelation knowledge hit! Ha ha

So Firebug has been helpful for me to identify what parts of code stuff affects which parts of the page...Which is really helpful when comments are in a different language!

Have you tried free PHP IDE "Codelobster PHP Edition" with special Drupal plug-in?