Build A Website, Start To Finish With Complete Open Source Software
When you think of software today, especialy in the multimedia field you think of high prices. Open-Source software totally changes that for the better. What is open-source? Open-source is software whos source code is made completly free to the public, thus making the software 100% free. The purpose of this article is to show you how you can build a website from start to finish, including - designing, coding, flowcharting, submitting, registering and even hosting! That is the beauty of open-source, its goal is to be free so it can be developed better. Open-source programs are really taking off, and its not just design related. There are complete computer solutions that can be made 100% free, from its operating system to its whatever. In the media design area, there is a large amount of developent because so many designers/coders etc decided there needs to be a cheaper alternative to getting good quality software. So they did just that. What I will be doing now is starting from the very first step in creating a website with all open-source software.
Step 1. HTML Editors:
There are many types of open-source editors out there. I will give you examples of both hard-coding html editors and WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. The best thing about these editors is they have other uses besides HTML! Most have built in color coding and syntax checking for other programming languages such as CSS, Javascript, C++ etc.
The items in the following list are 100% Open-Source
- Nvu Complete Webauthoring System
(Hard Coding and WYSIWYG)
- WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
- Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
- Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today's most popular browsers.
- Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
- Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
- Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
- The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.
- Download: HERE
- TSWebEditor (Hard Coding)
- Syntax Highlight for more than 20 languages. And if you can't find a syntax highlight that match your needs, you can easy create your own highlighter.
- Function Hints feature displays information about the function with arguments, return type and if available a short description.
- Code Browser shows all important program stuff like includes files, functions, classes
- Color Coding
- PHP Debugger to debug your PHP scripts with Xdebug and find runtime errors quicker.
- Unicode - tsWebEditor can read and write files with ANSI and Unicode (UTF-8, UTF-16) encoding.
- FTP Edit - you can edit files directly from ftp servers. Download and upload files with an external ftp client is with this function history.
- Syntax Checker - Check your (X)HTML and XML files with the included Tidy library for syntax errors
- Intense Help Documentation
- Download: HERE
Info: Dreamweaver retails for US $399.00 Dreamweaver is not open-source.
The above examples of open-source HTML editor tools are very strong examples of what you can do without paying anything and getting quality software in return. The Nvu solution seems to have a great working environment like dreamweaver does. So here is a tip. If you want to get Dreamweaver, but you cant just yet, then try out Nvu. You can also get a trial of Dreamweaver here. But that takes the point out of this article.
The next section I will discuss Open-Source alternatives to graphical design applications. That is the next step with creating a web page.
Step 2. Open-Source Graphical Tools >>
