I am experimenting with site design using the J-Learning site as a guide. I have worked with blogging software quite a bit and am fiddling with both WordPress and Drupal as the CMS for the system. I’m interested in working with Dreamweaver to edit the layout of the site, and that is something I have never tried with a CMS--and I imagine there are all kinds of potential pitfalls.

Can anyone point me to a good resource (or give me some good advice) on how to make Dreamweaver 8 talk to my CMS?

Thank you!

Just use ftp to download and edit the templates and then to upload the edited templates back. If you want to learn Dreamweaver, you could start with some tutorials:
http://www.adobe.com/support/dreamweaver/tutorial_index.html

I learned about Dreamweaver buy just playing with it and with the help on the internal “help”. I say that because not all the time you’ll use all the features so in my opinion this system helps you to gain time.