Finally Seeing the Benefits of Dreamweaver

I was never a big Dreamweaver user. Since 1999, when it was a Macromedia product, I used it as a glorified Notepad. Dreamweaver was always just a spell check for my code. I never learned how to make Dreamweaver sites or use Dreamweaver templates. It just didn't seem that helpful and I preferred to code by hand in code view. Upgrading from Macromedia Dreamweaver MX to the Adobe CS5 version seemed like kind of a waste, but I needed the new Photoshop and Illustrator.
This weekend I finally learned about setting up a PHP environment in Dreamweaver. Using XAMPP, and my sites set up in Dreamweaver, I can now work entirely locally before I'm ready to upload to the server. This beats working in my "test" folder on my hosted site. This also saves me from accidentally torching my real database while working on a new app, such as my portfolio updater app that I'm working on for marlenacannon.com.
Bonus: Set up the FTP information for the site in the "Remote Info" option of the Dreamweaver site manager options, and you can bypass having to use Filezilla to manually send updated files to the web server.
Dreamweaver, I'm finally seeing the benefits for a design person who also works with PHP and MySQL and doesn't need a WYSIWYG editor.