HomeSite Development

Introduction

HomeSite is one of the better HTML editors as far as we are concerned. It is most certainly not a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) and has recently been aquired by MacroMedia (those good people whom produce DreamWeaver) when they took over Allaire. HomeSite, currently on version 5, is an excellent text based editor and is claimed to have over a million users.

Despite the doubts about the future of HomeSite it is a very versatile tool and has the added advantage that the user can write their own VBScripts to run alongside the application. HomeSite comes with its own Object Model but even though it is rather primitive we are able to write our own tools.

Documentation

With the release of Version 5 we opted for the printed manual and spent far too much on the documentation and the FedEx courier to bring it over from the US to discover that the documentation on the Object Model is severely flawed as to be almost useless.

In time we will have the Object Model reproduced here.

Scripting

An Improved FTP Upload Script

One of the major bugbears of HomeSite is that using the iterative file deployment scripts takes almost forever. This script changes all that by attempting to post only the most recent updates rather than a brute force FTP upload. What used to take fifteen to twenty minutes for the script to check and upload a large project now only takes a matter of seconds.

If there are any comments or suggestions for updates then please drop me a mail at malcolm.smith@dragondrop.com.

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