Software Review: NetObjects Fusion (Part 2)/Web Developer®

Software Review: NetObjects Fusion (Part 2)

By David Fiedler

SiteStructure Editor — this gives you not only a high-level view of your site (it looks like an organization chart), but it lets you actually rearrange your site’s structure via drag-and-drop: move pages around, add new ones underneath, etc. If you’ve already created links between pages, they’re automatically updated when you move the pages. Speaking of creation, you can import your current site into Fusion, though the conversion isn’t perfect, especially if you have frames or finicky layouts. But you’ll still save tons of typing.

Once you create the site, you can go in and edit the pages in true WYSIWYG style (if you insist on seeing it in your favorite browser, a single button will launch and preview it for you). This consists of dropping objects (which can be text boxes, pictures, tables, multimedia, Java applets, etc.) on a blank tablet. Resize, rearrange, and relax :-). If you have repeating content, such as copyright notices, headers, navigation bars, or banner ads, you can move them to the “outside” of your page to a master border area, where they can become automatically framed with a single click.

Need more control over your pages? You can add your own custom HTML at any point: before, inside, or after an element; or use one of the included Java applets for a message board, form processor, site map, or a half-dozen more functions — no “server extensions” needed. You also get a copy of Acadia Infuse, a full-featured JavaScript point-and-click development tool.
Style is one thing Fusion has in spades. It comes with about 50 pre-defined styles from Studio Archetype and other top design firms, but you can take bits and pieces from these styles as you desire, and alter them to suit your fancy. For instance, the “Buttoned Up” style I used in this article really has a nice pastel yellow background, but it wasn’t compatible with the Mecklermedia nav bars, so I just changed the background to white. And the “belt buckle” banner at the top was too wide for our page design, so I simply cut it down. Oh yes, you can draw shapes directly in Fusion, and create “hot spots” for image maps.

You can publish ODBC or ISAM databases really easily. There are lots of neat features here, though I don’t have enough database expertise to wring this out fully. But I can read specs well enough to tell that Fusion won’t let you run a live database dynamically, right out of the box: you’ll have to write some scripts. On the other hand, they’ve put enough hooks in Fusion so that you can do this.
One-button publish via built-in FTP! Not only that, but just before you hit the magic button, you can select to publish in text-only mode, or greyscale (shudder), or a special low-resolution mode, so you can generate different versions of your site for special purposes with no great effort.
Speaking of details, did you notice the bullets, true curly quotes and em dashes in this article? They’re tricky to code in HTML, so most people don’t bother using them. But they’re a snap with Fusion.

Of course, now you’ll want to try Fusion out for yourself. And you should, because working with it is the best way of finding out whether it will match your coding and design techniques. Fusion certainly takes more horsepower than bringing up Notepad, but it’s not a total resource hog the way Microsoft’s latest offerings tend to be. And it manages to be an easy-to-learn, intuitive, yet powerful tool, all at the same time.

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