Setting up your development enviornment correctly greatly helps the process of development. Here are few tips on how you should setup the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of choice.
Developers working with ShadoCMS usually use either Eclipse (with CFEclipse), Dreamweaver or a simple text editor (like Notepad).
Eclipse (with CFEclipse Plugin)
We highly recommend using Eclipse with CFEclipse plugin.
The most important part of using Eclipse with a ShadoCMS site is setting up the project. When you are creating a new project in CFEclipse, you should setup the project at the level of the ShadoCMS site folder, and not at the webroot level. This setting becomes important especially if you start using a testing framework like MXUnit to write tests for the code you are working on.
Also, once the project is setup, you should setup the URL for the project. This can be done by right-clicking the project in the Navigator window and "Edit URL". Set the URL to the URL on which the project is browesable. For example: http://localhost:8500/yoursite/ . This greatly helps in viewing changes as you change the templates. You can simply press F12 key to load up the browser with the page you are working on.
Adobe Dreamweaver
For Dreamweaver, when you setup a new "Site" you can either create the site at the level of a ShadoCMS site folder level, or the webroot level.
CODA
For developers using OS X Coda is an excellent development environment for working with CFML
Text Editors
If you are using a generic text editor, they you don't need to do anything special to work wiith ShadoCMS site files. Simply open them up in the editor and work on them.