One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Bluefish

by Eric Foster-Johnson

December 20, 2001 —

Bluefish is not a true, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor.
Instead, Bluefish refers to itself as a "What You See Is What You Need"
interface, according to the project Web site at
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl. No matter how it's labeled, Bluefish is
an HTML editor with lots of support for building dynamic pages with
PHP -- a popular Web scripting language.

What You See Is What You Need means that you see the HTML tags when
editing with Bluefish. Because of this, Bluefish is really meant for
people with a higher level of experience with the Web and HTML, as well
as being comfortable with HTML tags. This "experts-only" approach may
put off some users, but proves very helpful for those who know HTML
tags and, most importantly, know exactly what they want in terms of how
the HTML tags perform a particular task.

Unlike many editors, Bluefish offers some project management features
too. A project consists of an entire Web site made up of a number of
pages. In addition, Bluefish makes image thumbnails, a handy feature
for many sites, and provides support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
CSS can be used to provide a consistent set of fonts, colors, and
styles for your entire site. You'll find a list of the main features at
http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/functionality.php.

Bluefish highlights its support for PHP, a scripting language where you
embed your scripts inside an HTML document. PHP provides a very popular
means to dynamically generate content on Web sites. See
http://www.php.net/ for more on PHP.

Download Bluefish from http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/download.php. The
download sites linked from this page include Linux for Intel versions
in RPM format, source code, and Debian package (.deb) files for ARM,
PowerPC, and Intel Debian GNU/Linux releases, although these were for
the previous release, not the most recent one.

You can see the online manuals, in English, German, Italian, Hungarian,
and Spanish at http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/manual/.

ITworld