Sites & Projects in Tarantula 1.98

While talking about 'home pages', one thing worth noticing is that home pages are rarely single pages. More often than not, they are actually a set or collection of pages related in some way (usually content). Thus, a web-site is basically a collection of web pages which are linked together, and maintain some sort of consistency, at least in the way they look. For example, a web-site would generally have the same color scheme, or background image for all the pages. Or, taking this further, all pages will be consistent in the way they let a user browse, say, giving navigational aids in the form of site indexes etc. Tarantula helps to maintain consistency in a site by providing advanced project management options. Simply put, a 'project' in Tarantula is the equivalent of a web-site. You can add or remove pages from the site, and the project inspector helps you to visually browse the project, automatically checking for missing files in the project. Also displayed are expected download times for each page, and it's components.

Using the project manager, one can generate the HTML for all the pages in the project in one go. Since Tarantula knows which pages belong to the project, it is able to apply the generate option on all of them, without any need for loading and generating each page manually. It is also possible to rename files here, so that all references to the renamed file in the project are also corrected. Tarantula can also provide a list of missing files.

	Of course, what we mentioned earlier on this page : consistency of looks, is a major feature of Tarantula. By using the concept of Themes, one can apply a particular look to the entire project, thus changing the looks completely in general, while still maintaining the consistency across pages. These themes can be selected from certain preset ones, or new ones can be created and stored for later use. Each theme is capable of selectively changing the color schemes, font, backgrounds etc. of the page, applying the changes across the entire project or only selected files in the project. (BTW, themes can also be applied to current documents by choosing the 'Change Theme' option in the Tarantula Main Menu's 'Document' menu.

			Designing of the web-site is one thing, and making it available for everyone to see is another. For a site to be accessible on the Web, it has to be 'uploaded' to a web-server. One of the most common ways to do this is by using 'FTP' programs. Tarantula makes uploading the site more convenient providing an integrated interface to Windows FTP program. It automatically builds a list of files that need to be uploaded to the web-site (of course, this list can be modified manually), and then uploads all the files, creating any directory structures that are required on the web-server.

In fact, a number of people don't even publish to the web. For example, some people use HTML to create help files for their products, or write technical documentation and such things, or even to send a copy of the site to a friend, maybe for some sort of cheching. Tarantula makes this very easy, by providing a unique 'Publish to disk' option, using which the entire project is published into any directory on the system! This will create any required directory structure under the target directory as well. Also, if you want the 'other person' to be able to make changes/corrections and send the documents back to you, with a single click Tarantula can also publish the source THD files along with the HTMs. This can be considered a basic form of team development support. The 'Send' feature in the File menu can be used for a similar purpose.

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