Better late than never -- I was on vacation last week while Macromedia was making the big announcement, but I should mention it here as well: Dreamweaver 8 (and Studio 8) is being released very soon. The best news is that most existing extensions should work fine with DW 8. I have tested my own extensions with it and so far have not found any problems or inconsistencies.

DW 8 is a good upgrade, with some great coding tools finally available (code collapse, code toolbar, color picker from code view, and other goodies). Also, DW 8 has support for XSL transformations in a visual way, which I'll probably be writing about soon. I think XML/XSL is finally coming in to its own as a great way to deliver content that is machine readable -- separating content from presentation and still delivering basic html/css. I did some basic XSL transformations on my own RSS feed and the Community MX rss feeds by hand (and by copying/pasting from examples), but using the new DW tools would have made it much easier. Also, the new file comparison feature is great, as I have always used a third party comparison program. Now it can be used from within Dreamweaver, which saves a few steps.

If you are in one of the following cities, a traveling MM presentation is making the rounds. You can register at http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=series_detail&id=266 780&loc=en_us&trackingid=BXBS, but register early:

Chicago, 8/23
Los Angeles, 8/24
San Francisco, 8/25
McLean, 8/25
Washington DC, 8/25
Boston, 9/13
Montreal, 9/13
Toronto, 9/14
Ottawa, 9/15
New York, 9/15
Vancouver, 9/20
Calgary, 9/22

Register now, or check out some of Community MX's new articles on Studio 8 that ran from August 8 through August 12, with more coming. Also, Macromedia has a ton of articles on Studio 8 as well at Devnet.