Digital Media Designer: Review: Adobe GoLive 5

Go Manage, Go Code
Site management is greatly improved in version 5.0. Creating a hierarchy diagram for your site involves a few steps but is relatively easy. To create a new blank site, you click on the Designs tab and choose Design menu's New Site Design option. A new design appears where you can modify its name. To create the hierarchy, drag index.html from the Files tab to the Design View window. You can then right-click on the file name to select New Pages. This brings up a dialogue box where you can enter the number of pages that you want to name and to which you want to link settings. You can also add external style sheets for multiple documents quickly and easily. For live sites, the Site Report Controller collects and analyzes data for further improvements on site structure. You can find site files by file characteristic (file size, download time and date), errors, site objects and links.

GoLive 5's layout view

Developers who work with code will appreciate GoLive 5.0's enhanced code handling. Not only does GoLive protect code from accidental reformatting with its new 360Code feature, but Adobe has added more code control and code views overall. For example, you can now highlight and find certain tags, such as URLs and media links, at the click of a button while in the HTML Source Editor view. You can also display tag hierarchy by selecting the HTML Outline Editor's tab. Here, you can see settings for each tag on the page. The new Find by Element search tool lets you find and replace tags. Advanced Web-site developers will appreciate the Markup tree palette, which lets you view the hierarchical tree structure and find code-controlling selected text or objects. These same developers will also applaud the ability to add their own special tweaks to the software with the Extend Script API and SDK for third-party developers. The WebDAV tool lets Web professionals working as a team access a WebDAV server and preview sites before upload to the server, preventing files from being accidentally edited at the same time.

Those of you who don't know code can use the Dynamic Link for ASP feature to add database content. GoLive generates only Active Server Pages code, though, so the database will only work on an ASP-compliant server. Adobe says that future versions may provide other options, such as JHP or PHP support.

The system requirements for the Windows version of Adobe GoLive 5.0 are an Intel Pentium 200 MHz processor running Microsoft Windows 98, Windows 2000 or Windows NT 4.0 (Service Pack 4). For Macintosh systems, you'll need a PowerPC processor running Mac OS software version 8.6 or 9.0. Both PC and Mac versions require 48 MB of RAM (64 MB recommended); 50 MB of available hard-disk space; a color monitor resolution of 1,024 x 768 or greater; and a CD-ROM drive. The software supports W3C Standards as well as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), XHTML, DHTML, WebObjects, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Flash, QuickTime movies and Real Video.

Documentation and Support
GoLive 5.0's documentation, like that of many other Adobe products, is outstanding and detailed. The manual includes step-by-step guides on how to use program options, as well as a handy "Quick Reference Card." Adobe offers limited complimentary support for registered users. There's also a pay-as-you-go program. Free technical information is available by phone and e-mail. Adobe's Web site provides patches, plug-ins, tutorials and user forums, and a bunch of other useful resources.

GoLive 5.0's superb performance enhancements easily stand up to its competition in the Web-authoring market. The addition of all the advanced features has not compromised its ease of use one bit.