stationery, components and templates in golive
which is which?
Building a web site one page at a time, which is is way most of us amateurs do it, would be a pain if we didn't have some way to reuse page elements. GoLive gives you four options for doing this: Stationery, Components, Templates and Snippits. Each has it's positive and negative qualities but in brief here's the difference between them. Click the name of each for a short tutorial on how to use that feature.
Snippits - are little bits of code that you keep handy for use in a page. The "little bit" could be a table, a line of text or anything else you want to keep handy. Since snippits are stored as global elements, they will be available in any site you open on the same computer.
Stationery - are whole pages with common elements in place ready to place materials. The big negative to Stationery is that updating the orginal document does not update the pages that were created using it. Stationery doesn't have as much use since Templates were introduced in version 6 of GoLive.
Components - are like Snippits in that they are pieces of code that are placed into a page. Two things make them different. Components only exist and are easily used in one site. The biggest advantage to Components is that updating the original code will also update all pages in which the Component was used.
Templates - combine the features of Stationery and Components. Like Stationery, Templates are full pages into which you place any common design elements. Like Components, updating a Template original page will update all the pages built using that Template. In addition, Templates have areas that are locked so that you can't accidently change the common elements. If other people on your team are using GoLive to edit pages created using a Template, they will also be blocked from editing the common elements.
As I said, Stationery doesn't really have much use if you're using GL version 6 or higher. To some extent Components have less usefulness as well. I find it much easier to create Templates for all my major sections and the use them to quickly update features like the navigation block at the left or the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.
The bottom line is that these tools are available in GoLive but it's up to you to find an organizational style that fits how you work. However, I can't imagine keeping this or other sites going without Templates, or to a lesser extent, Components and Snippits.
