Web Page and Site Maintenance Tools

Macromedia Backstage Designer Plus

• Backstage Designer for page editing
• Backstage Manager for rudimentary site management
• xRes to edit images (almost full $419 product included)
• Server, which is O'Reilly's WebSite1.1 Web server, to test forms and links
• Lots of clip art and page templates

Macromedia Backstage Designer

Backstage Desinger has a  few more capabilities than Netscape Communicator.

Pros:

• Forms to insert
• Java applets
• Netscape plug-ins
• Active-X controls
• Unique viewing features: Split Windows and "Document Tree" view (ouline of HTML tags)
• Allows creation of
• creation of image maps (you can graphically show regions on an image using an editor built into Designer)
• creation of forms
• creation of frames
• direct editing of HTML
• selection of font family

Cons:

• No frames support (even in new 2.0 version)
• Lacks common key bindings (e.g., CTL-i for italics)
• Cannot have multiple windows open!
• My copy didn't show images in editing tool

Site Management with Backstage Manager

• Notion of local (under development) vs. remote (on Web server) pages
• Contains ftp client for remote pages
• File browser window to view structure of pages:
• You can fix broken links

Support for editing remote pages is much better than Netscape Composer:

• "Remote" icon in above screen you define set of projects (folders), each a different set of Web documents.
• Designed to allow "offline" work on Web pages.
• GET and PUT menu items ftp files to/from your local machine.
• Red flag indicates which files are cached on your local machine.

New Features in Version 2.0

• WYSIWYG table editing, but with visual icons to manipulate table layout (e.g., divide or join cells), to avoid awkard table property windows.
• C++ database-handling objects to
• acquire data from forms without CGI-bin scripts
• querry Paradox, FoxPro, dBASE, Excel, and Microsoft Access databases.
• Enterprise edition ($999) links to Oracle 6, Sybase, Informix, Microsoft SQL Server databases.
• validate a database
• generate a report from within Web pages
• provide counter to track number of times page is visited
• collect info on browser used to display you Web pages, including IP address of machine using our site and the last URL it displayed
• define conditions to control page display:
first time visitor could see different page from registered visitors
• Like Microsoft FrontPage, requires server support to use full features, but server support is not available for UNIX servers.