Product: GoLive 5
Company: Adobe
Website: http://www.adobe.com
Estimated Street Price: $284.00
Review By: Julien JAY

Site Management

Adobe GoLive 5.0 obviously includes a site manager that can import existing websites, or create new one. When you switch to the site management view you can see all the files contained in it just like if you were into the Windows Explorer and best of all you can sort them by file size, modification date, status or misc. The external tab of the site manager shows all the links to email addresses or other websites sorted by categories and orphan files. The following available views of the site manager wear the Adobe’s claw as you can see all the various colors used by the web sites, as well as the different fonts sets. Sure the site manager offers a mapping feature that’ll display all the pages as icons linked between them by lines in a very complete diagram view. When you’ve got a large website you’ll be glad to know you can change the zoom level so you can see the full site contents easily. New to GoLive 5.0 is the ability to change the order and the position of your pages easily simply by dragging them. But you can also drag pages from a website view to another one very easily. Sure you can delete files, display their properties, the folder where they are stored in the Windows explorer or switch from landscape or standard view. Searching information through your website has been simplified by this new release as you can use wildcards; you can also search your websites for text, HTML code, files, or web objects. Reporting features of GoLive 5.0 are probably the most complete ones as you can now create various reports that shows for example all the pages that take more than x second to download, or all the pages that link to a specific kind of file. Adobe GoLive 5.0 can even download your website directly from the webserver and shows you the surfing flux and the various stats: downloading times of pages, number of available files, browsers info and more.  Finally GoLive 5.0 includes a FTP browser so you can connect on your webserver, apply the changes you want and upload, delete or modify files directly within GoLive! Best of the best is that the interface of the build in ftp browser looks like the Windows explorer and you can navigate on your web server like if it was a local hard disk: so you can throw out FTP clients.  

Adobe GoLive 5 FTP Browser

Adobe GoLive 5 WebSite Mapping

Database

Latest generation of web site builder software should include top-notch database features to help users build and add databases to their websites easily. As GoLive 5 supports dynamic Active Server Pages (ASP) links you can connect yourself to an ODBC compliant database without writing any code: good! The Dynamic Link feature can only work currently with Windows NT 4 and its Internet Information Server expansion pack or on Unix ASP enabled web servers which can be a bit bothering for you to find a provider that’ll host your website and offers this kind of service for an affordable price. The GoLive 5 dynamic link feature requires four folders to be copied on your webserver to work properly and you’ll have to put your database in one of this folder. If the Dynamic link feature of GoLive 5 is a bit fair it’s extremely simple to use: the dynamic link palette offers a simple way to build queries from a dialog box and link your contents to the database fields. Predefined scripted database related actions like ‘next/previous record’ or ‘view record details’ are also included in this new release of GoLive. However you’ll have to design and program your own forms into your website if you want add or edit records directly from the web pages. Hopefully Adobe has thought to advanced users that aren’t afraid by advanced programming as GoLive 5.0 perfectly supports SQL queries and advanced method of filtering.

Programming & miscellaneous

Adobe GoLive 5.0 comes with the Extend Script language environment that allows every user to create its own palette, floating windows and objects. You can also add using this feature new functions or new commands to the existing menus. It’s a great improvement to adapt GoLive to the way you’re working even if it requires a steep learning curve. Note that when several team members are working on the code of a single page the check-in checkout palettes will enhance their productivity. One of the major new features of GoLive 5.0 is the various design management. Indeed the site manager includes a powerful new tool intended to enable designer combining templates, layouts, and links tools in order to sketch out new sites or areas of existing ones. You can drag in the palette pages and sections as well as links. In the design tab of the window, you can store multiple designs in progress that are related to some pages or areas. It’s a very useful feature to quickly modify the look of a site or test new ones as GoLive takes in charge all the rewriting of relations between pages! 

Adobe GoLive 5 scripting environment