What's a good program for managing a mixed html-PHP site?

Our site, of which about half the content is PHP pages and is on a Linux
Apache server, is currently administered with Microsoft FrontPage 2003.

Okay, now that you've finished laughing, let me just say it's worked
pretty darn well considering everyone says "you gotta be crazy to have
FrontPage and PHP/Apache". But the writing is on the wall, considering
Frontpage is discontinued, is designed for simpler sites, and there are
so many annoying little quirks as a result of Microsoft pretending that
PHP doesn't exist. I would like something that lets me edit a plain
html page with a degree of WYSIWYG, and launches the appropriate text
editor or whatever when I open a php file, and also manages uploading
any changed pages. Frontpage does all of these pretty well, though the
FPServer Extensions are a bit flaky on our Linux server. Is there such
a beast out there?

Gary Hasler wrote:

> Our site, of which about half the content is PHP pages and is on a Linux
> Apache server, is currently administered with Microsoft FrontPage 2003.
>
> Okay, now that you've finished laughing, let me just say it's worked
> pretty darn well considering everyone says "you gotta be crazy to have
> FrontPage and PHP/Apache". But the writing is on the wall, considering
> Frontpage is discontinued, is designed for simpler sites, and there are
> so many annoying little quirks as a result of Microsoft pretending that
> PHP doesn't exist. I would like something that lets me edit a plain
> html page with a degree of WYSIWYG, and launches the appropriate text
> editor or whatever when I open a php file, and also manages uploading
> any changed pages. Frontpage does all of these pretty well, though the
> FPServer Extensions are a bit flaky on our Linux server. Is there such
> a beast out there?

Dreamweaver.

Flamer.

Gary Hasler wrote:

> Our site, of which about half the content is PHP pages and is on a Linux
> Apache server, is currently administered with Microsoft FrontPage 2003.
>

Eh?

FP is an OK HTML layout tool and upload thingy, but 'managing' your site?
I'd look for a lot more functionality, and probably using multiple tools.

First, you shouldn't be using the same tools for developing your PHP and
doing your layouts - although TBH most templating systems don't really make
it easy for designers to create templates.

Code editing and editors is argued about a lot - you might try
http://www.php-editors.com/ for some reviews. I'd definitely recommend
Firefox with the web developer toolbar and Venkmann for testing the pages
and developing javascript.

As to publishing....well there's lots of tools - I even wrote one myself in
Perl (see http://pushsite.sourceforge.net/readme.html#if for pushsite and
some other similar tools). But a better way to manage the files is via a
clustering system (rsync, AFS ....)

For analyzing the traffic, I tend to use AWStats.

That just leaves monitoring tools....but there's not a lot of choice out
there, and most aren't really worth the money either.

HTH

C.

Colin McKinnon wrote:

> First, you shouldn't be using the same tools for developing your PHP and
> doing your layouts - although TBH most templating systems don't really make
> it easy for designers to create templates.

OK--"templating systems" ...that sounds promising. I've heard the term but
never really investigated. So far I've been just designing an html page using
sample values in FP, then saving as .php, opening the html in a php-aware text
editor and writing the script for pulling in and handling data.

> I'd definitely recommend Firefox with the web developer toolbar and Venkmann
> for testing the pages and developing javascript.

Yes been using Netscape (same thing?) for testing Javascript; never heard of
Venkmann...will check it out.

> As to publishing..... a better way to manage the files is via a clustering
> system (rsync, AFS ....)

Again new terms to me...will search on them..

> For analyzing the traffic, I tend to use AWStats.

Yes..use it..pretty good.

Thanks.