Macromedia Sitespring review

Macromedia has tried to make it look and behave like an application and resisted the temptation to indulge in some sort of designer's fantasy. This is a good move and makes the system easy to become familiar with. The user interface that the clients see is called the Project Site and can be viewed by anyone on the project via a Web browser. This interface is built based on a template, several of which are supplied, although you'd obviously want to customise this to match your company's image.

The next step is to set up a project and assign a priority, owner, client and status to it. You can then add users to the team, while areas are automatically set up to display and manage Tasks and Discussions. Tasks are assigned to a user and given a status. The user is informed by email and they can then check the details via their browser. The user to whom a task is assigned can't delete the task but can alter its status to indicate what stage the job is at.

The discussion group works in a similar way, with the project team being informed by email of any posts made. This can lead to a lot of emails if the discussion is lively. One of the limitations of the discussion forum is that it's a single thread, so you can refer to the last comment posted but not to a previous one. This is a big disappointment compared to other Web-based discussion groups and, again, as this is the first version, perhaps we'll see some improvement here.

The final step in building a project is to set up the paths to the files that are associated with the project. These files have to exist on the Sitespring server within a shared folder. Sitespring has a full versioning engine so that previous versions of files are kept and can be rolled back at anytime. The clever thing here is that the files don't need to be opened via Sitespring or Dreamweaver for this versioning to work.

To test this claim, I opened a file stored on the Sitespring server on a workstation using Notepad. I made a small change and resaved it with the same name in the same location, thus overwriting the old file. When I checked in the project's Web page the file was showing with one modification, which I could 'roll back' if I wished by opening the previous version using the Web interface and resaving. So now you have protection against someone on the team making a change to a Web page and accidentally breaking it.

Client reassurance

The project site that Sitespring creates is a great mechanism for clients to be reassured that things are happening with the development of their Web site and also to give them a system to post messages and be involved in discussions. Better than this is the ability to assign tasks to client users. How many times has a client chased progress on a Web site when the hold-up has been that it's waiting for content or a decision from the client? By having a system such as this, hopefully everyone will know what's required of them and what others are doing to progress the project.

One major problem I came across was when I posted a Web page that needed approval to the project Web site. When users click on the link to approve this Web page, it opens in the browser. However, it had its images broken and the style sheets were missing. In my setup, I never managed to get this working properly, although, in demos I've seen, this was working fine. It must be something to do with the configuration of Sitespring and the Web server, but no amount of tweaking corrected the problem.

The speed at which the Sitespring pages were delivered also seemed to be a little slow, particularly the first time you access them. The server used was a 500MHz machine with 512Mb of RAM and twin IDE hard disks - hardly a top specification but still adequate for a Web server serving just three people.