In this article we will cover KompoZer. We cannot do that without mentioning NVU (pronounced "new view"), though. NVU was a project started by Linspire Inc., whose aim was to bring Linux to the masses and who saw that the Linux environment lacked a web authoring program. However, Xandros acquired Linspire in 2008, and the NVU project was halted. Since the license of NVU did not permit bugs in the code to be fixed, the project was not continued by Xandros. However, the project was then picked up by Fabien Cazenave and was continued with the name KompoZer. If you wish to install NVU or KompoZer on your Linux box, go with KompoZer.
If you read our previous article, we finished with SeaMonkey's Composer. Now we are going one more step further and will be working with a seemingly basic, but powerful web authoring program. People who have worked with Microsoft's Frontpage will not have a big learning curve, since KompoZer's interface is more or less similar to Frontpage.
KompoZer starts with a nice “Did you know that...” tip, which warms you to the program and also lets you discover the hidden functionalities. I recommend to keep the tick on “Show tips at startup”.
When you start KompoZer, you are presented with a blank page. You can start typing your webpage immediately or open a page that you have edited previously, or better yet, a page that you have downloaded freely from the Internet. The screenshot on the left shows a freely available webpage that I have downloaded from the Internet (Defiant), shown in KompoZer.
As we see in the image, the interface bears similarities with SeaMonkey's Composer. The sequence of the icons in the toolbar - New, Open, Save, Publish, Browse, Anchor, Link, Image, Table, Form, as well as the font selection toolbar with font face (fixed with, variable width, Times, Courier), font size, bold/italic/underline formatting, alignment and the tabs at the bottom showing Normal, HTML Tags, Source and Preview are all the same. So, if you have beared with me so far, we will not face difficulties in using KompoZer even if you have already come to grips with a simple web site editor, such as SeaMonkey's Composer.
Next: Code view, additional features and to whom we recommend NVU/KompoZer.