I’m looking at Flux. It can be a little sluggish in the UI at times, but I do think that there are things in there that might make it useful. It seems, like many of these apps, to offer a modified WebKIt view where you do most of the work. You can, like Freeway, draw items and move them around. I think it would be perfectly possible to work in it using the design view alone.
The way the application presents itself is a little more “lumpy” than Freeway. Things are bigger - so those single line outlines on objects are wider. However, they come with “eras” which let you drag out margins and padding in the UI, and each item is labelled with its item type. If you click and hold on an item, all objects at that points are listed so you can select the one you want to work on. It’s a little like my wish list for Freeway’s inline working model!
No master pages, but items can be tagged as master objects, and they can be updated across the site from a window (no auto updating). As it works directly on HTML, it uses HTML comments to mark these items out - and there seems to be no way to clear those markers out before deployment, but still, this seems a small niggle.
As well as a WYSIWYG model, you can also get into the code - a pane in the window can be opened up, do in this you can edit the HTML or even the CSS files directly. This allows you to drop in server side scripting, such as PHP (though if you do this, the live preview starts to get scrambled a bit - you really need to be previewing properly in a browser through the server at this point). Fuse doesn’t seem to allow this internally.
There is one thing that’s stopping me from plonking down my cash - and that’s tracking links, hyperlinks and other references to external resources. If you rename a page (say changing it from .html to .php), or move the pager to a sub folder, all external links seem to be lost. You’ll need to reset those. Image references, css, javascript, even hyperlinks (which will break site wide, it seems), possibly more, will need resetting. If your menu navigation is a master item, reapplying that will probably break if your page is in a sub folder too.
This is holding me back - I have asked their support forums about this, but I’ve had no reply to this query (though I have had replies to other questions). Their support forum kind of worries me too. It seems rather, err, bereft in places.
Still, for simple sites on one level, it’ll probably do the job. For more complex site, I feel the jury is still out. I am keeping on with their demo on a test site, just to see if my concerns are unfounded. If they are, I’ll post more here.
http://www.theescapers.com/product.php?product=flux
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