Fix web "groundhog day"

[pauland]

We have incessant threads about memory usage and FTP problems during web publishing.

I realise some of the technical issues involved with Xaras web publishing and the use of memory and FTP issues to web hosts are difficullt to solve, but here is my wish list:

Web generation memory issues:

If Xaras web generation cannot be redone to process things a page at a time and not require massive amounts of memory for big web sites, then please put effort into giving the user better diagnostics and advice, so they can try and optimise their projects to avoid the memory error. If there are "large" graphics on a page, just highlight them as candidates for optimisation. If the software looks like it is consuming too much memory, warn the user gracefully and provide advice for optimisation. "Out of memory" is not condusive to a good user experience and it is becoming a common user experience.

FTP transfer problems:

Please add a "test" function to verify that the FTP environment is functioning correctly and ensure that directories are writeable.

If there are problems suggest what they might be and advise the user how they might be able to solve them.

At the moment the forums are swamped with the same Xara web problems and it is very tedious for the existing community to be participating in web groundhog-day, and very frustrating to new users that are just hit by technical issues that could be handled better, causing them to be dissillusioned with the product.

[edit: I suspect that it should be possible for Xara to improve the users experience when they remove export directories after publishing, therby preventing Xara from optimising FTP transfer to changes only. It should be possible, at the very least to warn the user why the whole site is being transferred and not just the changes]

[Soquili]

Hi Paul,

I agree with what you say.

The FTP issue could be improved simply by having Xara shell out to a command window for FTP and enable verbose mode for more details about the transfer.

As for Out of Memory issues that may require a major change to the applications core code. Camelot was designed to contain a vector drawing within memory, long before multiple page support. Maybe this is justification to separate the Web App from the Vector App as I have wished for since Web Designer was released.