[Gllug] Web design?

Tue May 17 23:20:24 UTC 2005

Chris Bell wrote:
> Hello,
>    A friend who is experienced in design, layout, photo-setting, and
> printing, as well as web design, using a combination of Acorn, Apple, and M$
> PC, wants to try using Linux. He has used various packages, including
> dreamweaver and photoshop, but would appreciate suggestions about
> Linux-based packages.
>    He has seen a package called NVU, has anyone tried it?
> 
>    Thanks for any advice.

I made a similar switch a while back. There where three major things I 
used dreamweaver for, the template system, a decent text editor and the 
ability to make minor changes in the content via the WISIWIG.

For a text editor, I use Quanta, it has a reasonable syntax 
highlighting, features such as auto-suggest for CSS tags and PHP 
functions. I code mostly in XHTML now, so I've got a large set of custom 
key bindings such as
alt-p - add <p> tags around current selection,
alt-+ - capitalize selection

You can also write short shell scripts, load them as an action and bind 
them to a shortcut, for things like strip all tags from selection, etc.

Firefox, with the web-developer extension, is very useful for doing 
things such as "Outline Block level attributes", that gives a clear 
picture of whats happening with XTHML/CSS

For the template system, I've switched to using an easy PHP template 
system. An example of this system is:

--- index.htm ---
<?php
$title = "My Homepage";
$content =<<<HTML
This is my Homepage
HTML;
include_once('templates/template.php');
?>

--- template.php ---
<html><head>
<title><?php echo $title; ?></head>
</head>
<body>
<h2><?php echo $title; ?></h2>
<p><?php echo $content; ?></p>
</body>

For previewing pages, I setup a local apache server with mod_php, I set 
the root directory to ~/websites, and in my hosts file I create an alias
127.0.0.1   www

http://www/website.com/index.htm  links to my local server, and
http://www.website.com/index.htm  links to the remote website

You can add in far more display logic with PHP than you can using 
dreamweaver scripting.

For the ability to make minor content changes via WISIWIG, I've lost 
that ability, but the template system means I don't need to find the 
content within miles of template, and CSS keeps the content fairly clean.

I haven't had a look at recent versions of NVU, but my impression is 
that it may be a little basic (especially the text editor side of 
things) for an experienced designer. Quanta is good for a something 
that's familiar to a windows user. VI or Emacs may be better, but I 
haven't gotten round to learning them properly, and there is a steep 
learning curve to learning all their keystrokes.

GIMP is a definite photoshop replacement, I'd recommend "Grokking the 
GIMP" http://gimp-savvy.com/BOOK/ for learning how to use it, and to 
learn photo-editing.

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