Adobe GoLive 6.0

A powerful web design tool that can give Dreamweaver a run for its money.

Just as Livemotion has trailed along in the wake of Macromedia's Flash, so GoLive has spent the past couple of years playing second fiddle to Dreamweaver, Macromedia's popular web design program. Like LiveMotion, GoLive has just had a major upgrade that suggests that Adobe really does have a strong strategy up its sleeve after all.

The biggest new feature in this upgrade doesn't appear within GoLive at all. It's an entirely new program that comes bundled with GoLive and is called the Web Workgroup Server (WGS). Described by Adobe as an asset management tool, WGS provides a powerful range of site-management, versioning and archiving features.

You start by specifying the users in your workgroup who have access to the files in the WGS. As members of the workgroup add pages to the site, it automatically creates a revision list that's associated with each page.

The revision list keeps track of all the different versions of the page that are created by different users, allowing you to compare the source code of each version so that you can keep track of any changes. You can then specify that a particular version is labelled as the current version, so other members of the workgroup know which version to work with.

Individual users also have the ability to lock entire pages, or just specific parts of a page, so that they can't be changed by others. As a precaution, anyone with administrator privileges for the WGS can unlock these pages in case the original user is absent for some reason.

Another sensible function available to the workgroup administrator is the ability to take a snapshot that records the state of the entire website. This snapshot can then be stored and saved as an emergency backup.

At the moment, the WGS is designed specifically to work with GoLive websites, but Adobe is planning to update its other products, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, so that they support it as well. In time, this will let the WGS store all sorts of media assets that can be used for web, print and other forms of distribution.

For this strategy to work, Adobe needs to convince web designers that GoLive is a match for rivals such as Dreamweaver and FrontPage. With that in mind, Adobe has added a long list of new features to GoLive in addition to the features provided by the Workgroup Server.

The first thing you'll notice is the selection of new wizards that appear when you launch the program. The simplest wizard will merely create a new blank page for you to work on, but you also have two options for creating entire sites.

Selecting a single-user site will create a project folder and settings file that is stored locally on your PC. A workgroup site can be stored on a remote server and accessed by other users.

Both types of sites can be started quickly by using the provided templates, or you can start from scratch with a single blank page.

Once you enter the main program you'll notice a number of interface refinements. One nice touch is the ability to drag palettes to the side of the screen, where they shrink down into small tabs. Clicking on the tab causes the palette to expand when you need it, and then shrink away once more when you're finished. This will help to keep GoLive's profusion of floating palettes under control.

The program's main layout view has also been modified so that it can be split into two separate panes. One pane shows the graphical view of your page, while the other shows HTML source code, allowing designers to keep an eye on their code while they work.

To help you design the structure of your site, there's a new Diagram mode. This is a flowchart program that lets you create diagrams of the site structure.

For the really ambitious web developers, GoLive now includes support for Wireless Markup Language, i-Mode and Wap authoring. There's also a new technology called SmartObjects, which lets GoLive link to variable files created in other Adobe programs such as LiveMotion 2.0. A SmartObject file can be updated in LiveMotion and the file will automatically be updated within GoLive as well.

Other Adobe programs, such as Photoshop 7.0, have been updated to support this feature.

The combination of SmartObject technology and the WGS point the way forward to a complete production system that will let all Adobe products work together seamlessly in a workgroup environment. That's something for the future, though. In the meantime, GoLive 6.0 stands on its own as a powerful web design tool that can certainly give Dreamweaver a run for its money.

Contact

Adobe: 1 Roundwood Avenue, Stockley Park, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB11 1AY.
Tel: 020 8606 4000, Fax 020-8606 4004
www.adobe.co.uk/products/golive/