Re: Good Open Source Web Development software
On Monday 09 June 2003 14:03, Kevin Griffis wrote:
> I would like to eventually do all my web development on my Linux laptop and
> ditch FrontPage altogether. I am planning to build a site on a LAMP
> machine and was wondering what Open Source web design tools are out there
> for Debian. Does anyone have any recommendations?
>
> Kevin Griffis
I'd concur with recommending gvim for basic and fast editing, with the point
and click ability, and you can practice your vim commands as well.
For lamp web development, especially with you coming from frontpage (and
myself including frontpage and then dreamweaver), I'd recommend Quanta Plus.
It works heavily toward w3c standard compliant code (and if you look at the
top 100 sites, I doubt 10% of them are 100% standards compliant, and if you
have 100% standards compliant, you'll be excluding over 90% of the browser
users on the internet).
While Quanta Plus doesn't have wysiwyg yet, it is in the wish list, and
reportedly in the development tree as well. The development road map will be
implementing some great features, one of which I was discussing with the
developers in the last 24 hours, similar to frontpage's drag and drop map,
where you can drag and drop the web pages, and have the hyperlinks
automatically update (they are planning on doing this for all objects in the
web project, not just web pages).
Quanta Plus has picked up additional developers recently, and is under heavy,
active development. They have also been picked up by kde, so expect new
releases to be included in new updates of kde. The developers are
accessible, answering emails promptly. Have a look at their web page,
including the feature list, and the "do" list. If you see something
"missing" or something that they haven't thought of that you think belongs
with the app, go to the feature request page, and include your request.
You'll get a response back in a few hours or less. This is your chance to
help determine the direction of the application.
I looked at Amaya a while back, but wasn't able to get it to load under suse.
I did want to try it out though, and if I remember correctly, it came on the
knoppix disks, and I was able to look at it there (or someone else's
computer?). I also tried Bluefish for a while, and while I know others who
use Bluefish, I felt more comfortable with Quanta Plus. I read a while back
that Amaya development/updating wasn't very rapid. Don't know if this was
true or not at the time, or if it is true now. And Composer from Mozilla was
orphaned, then picked up again, then orphaned, and it may be picked up again
now. I tried that as well, tryin to find a solution to wysiwyg, but I didn't
like it.
If you haven't worked in a production environment with a wysiwyg editor, you
can't appreciate the type of rapid development that you can do with such an
editor. Yes it screws up the code. And fixing the code under frontpage was
a nightmare, but it was still faster than hand editing. And with
dreamweaver, you can adjust the settings to virtually eliminate non-compliant
code, and the few features that stick non-compliant code in can be mitigated
and fixed instantly because of the dual code/editing view. And the dual
code/editing view is what taught me basics of html in frontpage, and more
advanced html in dreamweaver.
One of the important features with Quanta Plus that isn't so well documented
or advertised, is that you can use the fish protocol, for an ssh connection
and transfer of the files to the web server, so you always have synchronized
copies of the web pages and objects on the web server, and on quanta plus.
Cervisia, the CVS gui frontend is right on the toolbar of Quanta Plus, for
versioning.
Dreamweaver and WinSCP is what was forcing me to dual boot into windows,
and Quanta Plus and fish/konqueror is what finally enabled me to break free
of windows. Haven't booted into windows in more than a year, and I'm now
deleting os files in the windows partitions from time to time in preparation
to reformat the windows partitions to linux/reiserfs. All of my subsequent
computer installs have been 100% linux. Hope you have the same experience.
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Here's some links that may help you decide:
http://quanta.sourceforge.net/
http://www.contentpeople.co.uk/issue3/quantaplus.php
older review that needs updating:
http://www.suse.com/us/private/support/howto/webeditor/index.html
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Bing.
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