meriadoc Posted April 6, 2008 Share Posted April 6, 2008 I'm looking for opinions from people that have used or continue to use Nvu as their Web Authoring System of choice. So far I've only taken a cursory look at the product and it appears to have many of the features found in Frontpage. What do you think of it? Did you have any trouble installing it? Have you encountered any problems while using it? None of the binary packages on the web site matched up with my Linux distribution (Fedora 7 or 8) so I attempted to compile from source. Getting the source was a little tricky because the link on the web site isn't exactly correct. I have yet to compile without it resulting in an error. I need to go through the steps again and make sure I didn't forget something critical. If you have any hints or tips please pass them on. One of the things that surprised me was that the source looked like a complete version of Mozilla or one of its sister products. In the meantime I have installed Seamonkey with its Composer. Seamonkey looks almost exactly like the version of Netscape Navigator I installed 5 years ago on RHL 7.3. I know the whole Mozilla story, but I would have expected a few more changes to have occurred since then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PerfectChaos Posted May 6, 2008 Share Posted May 6, 2008 I think it's on Synaptic Package Manager... It's not bad, but I think editing from source is a much better way to do things. I think it's better than FrontPage though, Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meriadoc Posted May 7, 2008 Author Share Posted May 7, 2008 Thanks for the reply. I was beginning to think I would not receive an answer. Fedora uses yum for package management rather than apt-get. I did find an rpm on the Nvu site that was close enough to install. It was built for RHEL4, FC3, and FC4 so it isn't exactly right, but so far it seems to work. During the install I had to ignore one of the dependencies, because the dependent package doesn't exist any more. One of these days I'm going to try compiling from source again and may even take the time to build an updated rpm for Fedora 8 or 9 which is due out in a few days. I also edit html directly, just not for everything I work on. I haven't used Nvu enough yet to come to the conclusion that it is better than FrontPage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meriadoc Posted May 10, 2008 Author Share Posted May 10, 2008 Since my last post I have discovered a few things about Nvu. At first glance the Nvu website appears to be well maintained and the project active. One of the questions in the FAQ is, "Is the Nvu project still active?" The answer is yes, but the last release, Nvu 1.0, was done June 28th, 2005. That doesn't seem very active to me. Another sign that there has been no activity is the Nvu support forum. The last posting was done in June of 2007. A few of the postings tell you to go to the WYSIFAuthoring forum to ask questions. Turns out that an unofficial bug fix version of Nvu called Kompozer was created. So it appears that Kompozer is the new Nvu, but one would think that the Nvu site should have been retired by now. Linspire supported the initial development of Nvu. A few of the postings on the WYSIFAuthoring forum hint that it was time to break away from Linspire to provide continued support in a community based atmosphere. The bottom line is that the Kompozer project looks to be a little more active. They have a website and a project on SourceForge. There are recent postings on the WYSIFAuthoring forum as well as recent entries on the SourceForge mailing lists. I've pretty much given up on compiling Nvu on Fedora 8. My efforts there ran into a number of problems. I found a patch for the first error I encountered, but the second error looked a lot more serious than I was willing to spend time on. Since then I have switched over to KompoZer. On their website they have a number of downloads available with binary packages for Win32, Mac OS X, and Linux. I went with an rpm that has been tested on RHEL5, Fedora 4 to 7, and Madriva 2007. So far everything I have used is working on Fedora 8. However, there is still plenty of functionality to test. My aim here was to find an Open Source alternative to FrontPage. Editing html directly is still alive and well, but when you want to bang out something quick a tool like this comes in pretty handy. I'd like to hear what other people are using. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
meriadoc Posted June 14, 2008 Author Share Posted June 14, 2008 It's been a while since I replied to myself so thought I would give everyone another update on my search for a web authoring tool. Turned out Kompozer has a few bugs that are quite annoying and the support group is not a very active bunch when it comes to exterminating them. So now I'm back to using the compozer in Seamonkey. That at least seems to run smoothly and have an active following. I would have loved to start coding and fix the bugs in Kompozer, but alas it seems like there would be a huge learning curve to get up to speed. There is a great deal of source code to wade through. Most of it looks to be an older version of mozilla/netscape. I just don't have the energy to take on a task like that right now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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