When my wife, Stephanie Rewis, decided to leave the gun-for-hire world and join a start-up, she was immediately faced with a decision on which CSS preprocessor to use – Sass or Less. And compounding the problem, her editor of choice, Dreamweaver, doesn’t provide color coding or hinting for either preprocessor – even though their files are really just CSS. So, being the good husband (and evangelist for Dreamweaver) that I am, I set out to remedy the problem. If you’re wanting to use Sass or Less with Dreamweaver, here’s how to make it work.

As always, here’s the disclaimer – you’re going to be editing files in Dreamweaver’s Configuration folder, so proceed with caution, make a backup of the originals, etc.

The first thing that we need to do is to tell Dreamweaver that it’s okay to open a .scss or .less file – something that Dreamweaver by default doesn’t understand. You’ll first need to take a peak in your personal Dreamweaver configuration folder – on a Mac, that’s located in ~username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Dreamweaver CS5.5/en_us/Configuration – and locate a file named “Extensions.txt”. If, for some reason, this file doesn’t exist, you can edit the master file located in Adobe Dreamweaver CS5.5/Configuration. Open the file and add SCSS (or SASS if you’re using the older syntax) and LESS to line 8, so that it reads: CSS,SCSS,LESS:Style Sheets. Save the file and restart Dreamweaver. You should now be able to click on a .scss or .less file in your Site panel and have it open in Dreamweaver.

Now, in order for Dreamweaver to understand that this, in fact, is a CSS file, you’ll need to edit MMDocumentTypes.xml located in the DocumentTypes folder in the Configuration folder. Open this file and scroll down to line 142. You’ll notice two properties on that line: winfileextension=”css” macfileextension=”css”. Add scss and less (comma seperated) to the appropriate property for your platform. Save the file and restart Dreamweaver. Open your .scss or .less file and you should see your familiar CSS code coloring and hinting!

If you’re serious about your Sass and/or Less, you should be using CodeKit, IMHO. CodeKit, in addition to other things, monitors your scss (or less) file for changes and then compiles it into CSS. I’m using CodeKit and Sass on every project – and loving it! To optimize my workflow, I actually link to the .scss file in my HTML (just remember to remove it before pushing the page live). That way, I can use Dreamweaver’s split view to edit the .scss file while looking at the page with Live View turned on. When I save the .scss file, CodeKit compiles the file into a CSS file that is also linked in my page. Sadly, Dreamweaver doesn’t know when the CSS file is changed, but simply hitting F5 (or the refresh button at the top of the document window) causes Dreamweaver’s Live View to refresh and I can see my changes.