Project Management in HomeSite

Remember when Notepad was the HTML editing tool of choice? Recall the thunderclap that HomeSite produced when it took the fledging Web community by storm with its rainbow of colorful code and plethora of usability features?

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Today, the consensus among leading industry publications, including PCWeek, InfoWorld, CNet, and PC Computing, is that HomeSite's What You See Is What You Need (WYSIWYN) editing environment remains unmatched for controlling code, ease of use, and extensibility. However, many of the same Web site designers who have counted HomeSite among their essential tools for years — along with a mouse and a modem — find themselves spending the majority of their time nowadays managing a team of designers and shepherding projects through the various stages of development and deployment.

HomeSite has continued to evolve in order to satisfy the expanding needs of the thriving Web development industry. By including potent project management features, handy deployment enhancements, and various usability tweaks, HomeSite's functionality will continue to grow along side the careers of its 350,000-strong users for years to come.

Everything in its Place

The multitude of files required in building a Web site, including HTML files, Cascading Style Sheets, images, application code, and scripts, can quickly overwhelm even the neatest of neat freaks. To remedy this situation, HomeSite allows Web designers to collect files associated with their initiatives into project folders and organize the folders into a directory.

Project folders are separated into two varieties: physical and virtual. Physical folders directly map to directories on users' local machines or network drives. Virtual folders essentially act as a storage locker for files that can exist on local hard drives or somewhere on the Web. Physical folders come in two flavors: auto inclusive and manual inclusive. Manual-inclusive folders require each file to be marked whether it should be included or not in the folder. Auto-inclusive folders accomplish the opposite of manual-inclusive folders by including every file that is mapped to the folder. While the type of files to be included can be designated (e.g., all JPEG files), individual files for inclusion cannot be specified.

Taken from the HomeSite documentation, the following table shows each folder type, a brief description, and its icon:

Icon	Folder Type	Usage
	Virtual folder	Use when you want to organize files from several different locations into one location in HomeSite.
	Auto-inclusive folder (physical)	Use when you want all of the files (or all files of a certain type) in a specific directory to be included in your project.
	Manual-inclusive folder (physical)	Use when you want to choose exactly which files, on a file-by-file basis, in a specific directory are included in your project.

For a brief tutorial on how to create a Project folder in HomeSite, click here.

Safe and Secure

Project managers must keep the reigns tight on version control when supervising a team of designers for large, complicated Web sites. A source control system allows team members to share files simultaneously without the possibility of accidentally modifying files in use. In addition, project managers can track various versions to chart progress and trace back problems to their source.

Using the Source Code Control (SCC) API, HomeSite can be integrated with a variety of standard source control products, both client and server based. Because Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe (VSS) has become the de facto tool for managing Web site development and maintenance, it will be used as the example application to illustrate the process for accessing a HomeSite project.

To access HomeSite Project files from Visual SourceSafe, complete the five steps below (from the HomeSite documentation):

1. Create a VSS project and add the HomeSite project files.
2. Create a working directory get the files from VSS. If prompted to select a source control provider, choose from the Source Control Provider list.
3. Create a HomeSite project in the working directory.
4. Right-click the project root and select Source Control > Map Project To Source Control.
5. Select the work directory and the appropriate VSS project folder.

To see illustrations of the above steps, click here.

Click here to find out how to share HomeSite Project folders with a version control system.

Deploying Web Sites the Easy Way

Traditionally, deploying Web sites required a separate FTP application to upload the files to a remote server. HomeSite 4.5 includes the Site Deployment Wizard, which allows a complete Web site to be copied from one server to another in just a few simple steps. The Deployment Wizard can either deploy a project directly to a host server(s) or create a deployment script, which can be run repeatedly. Saving designers valuable time, deployment scripts can also be used to accomplish a variety of tasks during deployment, such as file compression.

Click here to see a step-by-step guide on how to deploy a site directly with the Site Deployment Wizard.

To create a deployment script, follow the steps below (from the HomeSite documentation):

1. Open the project.
2. Click the Deploy Project button or choose Project > Deployment Wizard to see the Deployment Wizard window.
3. Click Generate Deployment Script then click Next.
4. Enter a name for the script in the Deployment Task Name box.
5. Choose the language for the script, VBScript or JScript, from the Script Language Options.
6. A pathname based on the project name is automatically entered for the script in the Save Script to File box. Entering a new pathname or clicking the Browser button to use the Save As dialog box can change it.
7. If you want to see the script in the HomeSite Editor window, leave Open script in editor after generation selected.
8. Click Next.
9. Choose the type of script to be generated: Project Element Iterator Script, File-by-File Deployment Script, or Project-wide Upload Script. Click Next.
10. To deploy to a local or network path:
    • Click Local/Network Deployment, click Next, and then click Finish.
11. To deploy to a remote server:
    • Click Remote RDS/FTP Deployment and click Next.
    • Select the server(s) to be deployed to and click Next.
    • Click Finish.

HomeSite also includes a traditional FTP agent for uploading and downloading individual files. For instructions on how to set up the FTP feature in HomeSite, click here.

A Tuck Here, a Nip There

Packing a vast array of usability tweaks, HomeSite makes working as a team on large projects easier and more efficient. For example, the collapsible text feature allows blocks of code to be hidden from immediate so that designers can focus on certain portions of the content. A customizable marker displays the first few characters of the collapsed selection.

Re-using code snippets can slash development time drastically at the same time as reducing coding errors. HomeSite facilitates using code snippets by allowing a central code repository to be created that can be shared by a development team. Anyone with access to the shared older can add, edit, and delete snippets.

To create a shared snippets folder, follow these directions (from HomeSite documentation):

1. Open the Options > Settings dialog box (F8) and click Locations.
2. In the Shared Snippets box, use the Browse button to navigate to the shared folder location and click OK.
3. In the Snippets tab (in the Resources pane), right click and choose Create Shared Folder. The folder icon changes color to show that it is shared.

Extended Find and Replace commands can also assist in large, distributed projects. For example, find and replace can be run on one document, one folder, or multiple Projects. However, keep in mind that the Extended Replace command skips all read-only files.

The following bullet list details more Extended Find and Replace functionality (from HomeSite documentation):

• Find and replace commands can be run against the current document, all open documents, folders, or projects.
• Click the arrow button next to the Find what box to selectively save and reuse entries.
• The In folders option let you restrict searches to files with specified extensions and to just the root folder.
• Check the Match Case option for case-sensitive searches.
• Check Regular expressions to enable parsing of regular expression entries.
• Select the Skip Tags While Searching option to search the page content only, excluding the tags themselves. This option is not available when the Regular expressions option is enabled.
• The Extended Replace dialog box allows files to be backed up before making replacements at the folder or project level.

In addition, HomeSite can also save time on large projects by verifying links across an entire Project. Rather than wasting time validating each link by clicking on every one, designers can select Verify Links by right clicking on a project name in the Projects tag of the Resource window, choosing a root URL option, and executing the verification process.

Conclusion

In today's fast-paced Web development world, anything that saves time and reduces complexity should be exploited to its fullest extent. This article serves as a jumping-off point for further exploration of HomeSite's project abilities. To learn more, refer to the documentation included with HomeSite or the online resources available on Allaire.com.