HomeSite is an HTML editor owned by Adobe Systems (formerly owned by Macromedia). Unlike WYSIWYG HTML editors such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, HomeSite is designed for direct editing, or "hand coding," of HTML and other website languages. It is available for the Windows platform, and is priced at US$99.

History

It was originally developed in Borland Delphi in 1995 by Bradbury Software (founded by Nick Bradbury). In March 1997 Allaire Corp. from Cambridge, Massachusetts (founded by brothers Jeremy and J.J. Allaire) acquired HomeSite and Nick Bradbury joined Allaire. After leaving Allaire in 1998, Nick went on to work on the CSS/xHTML editor TopStyle and the RSS reader FeedDemon. Macromedia acquired Allaire in 2001 and was in turn acquired by Adobe in 2006.

At Allaire, a version of HomeSite was created as an IDE for ColdFusion, selling as ColdFusion Studio. This version was later merged into Dreamweaver MX under Macromedia, where it is now called HomeSite+. Development of HomeSite continued in parallel and the standalone HomeSite is still sold separately, whereas HomeSite+ is not.

In the days that HomeSite was under Nick Bradbury, and then part of Allaire, it had an enthusiastic following from its user community. While many software companies at the time had WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website creation tools where the user never saw the code, Nick Bradbury created a product that was code centric and popular with those that preferred to work directly in the code, a concept that was dubbed "What You See Is What You Need." Further he built in a variety of ways that users could customize the user interface and extend the functionality. Allaire kept this concept going as its target market of ColdFusion users were code-centric as well. Allaire developers expanded upon Nick's original HomeSite capabilities by adding features like built-in scripting, improved syntax coloring, and VTML for tag insight and tag editors.

Nick Bradbury and then Allaire had a policy of having an open support forum for those interested in its products, both current customers and prospects. The fans of HomeSite would contribute to the development of the product by making suggestions on-line and refining those suggestions amongst themselves. The Allaire developers would join in the discussion, participating and really incorporating user suggestions. Allaire used the open forum idea for beta programs as well. Allaire used HomeSite as a relative mass-market product, keeping the price at $99 and using widespread distribution. The idea was to get as many web developers using it as possible and then introducing them to ColdFusion. Allaire drove the HomeSite user community from 25,000 in 1997 to over 400,000 in 2001. The focus was on building the community, not revenue. Users responded to that respect and love for the tool by supporting each other and by creating and sharing a wide variety of HomeSite extensions.

Macromedia licensed a copy of HomeSite to include in Dreamweaver 1.0 when it first shipped. This OEM deal started the relationship between the companies and eventually led to the acquisition of Allaire by Macromedia in 2001. Macromedia was acquired by Adobe in 2006.

Versions

Homesite 1.x (September 1996)

Allaire Homesite 2.0

Allaire HomeSite 3.0 (November 1997)

Allaire HomeSite 4.0 (November 1998)

Macromedia HomeSite 5.0 (2001)

Macromedia HomeSite 5.2 (January 2003)

Macromedia HomeSite 5.5 (September 2003)

There is also another version called HomeSite+ which is included in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and greater. HomeSite+ has extra functionality for ColdFusion application development, and is typically comparable to the version of HomeSite formerly called ColdFusion Studio. HomeSite+/CF Studio versions parallel standalone HomeSite versions.

Features

Customizable interface that includes dockable toolbars with custom buttons, a snippet manager with "tag snippets," and custom dialogs and wizards written in the VTML language.

'''Extensively scriptable to automate tasks or to perform advanced tasks using JavaScript or VBScript'''

Macro recorder can record a series of actions to create scripts for later playback*Enhanced code snippets save time by creating and saving reusable blocks of code, and can prompt for variable replacement when used.

Customizable syntax color coding for ASP, CFML, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, JSP, Perl, PHP, SQL, VBScript, VTML and XHTML. Syntax-coloring parser syntax and examples are available to help users to extend or write their own.

Search and replace utility

CSS editing via the included TopStyle Lite, or via integration with the full version of TopStyle, if available

Check your code with the built-in Code Validator, or use CSE HTML Validator with UI integration

Customizable code formatting formats your code to standards with Code Sweeper or HTML Tidy.

Integrated help browser shows installed help docs or HTML-format document sets added by the user. Useful for local, searchable copies of standards, tutorials, language references, etc

Project management and built-in FTP help manage and upload websites

Built-in tools for page link-checking, document weight and spell-checking

Works with source and version control software that supports SCCI, and with other packages via custom toolbars

Assign keyboard shortcuts to most any function, or to your own scripts or code snippets

The integrated browser view and the external browser list let you view your edited document quickly in your choice of browsers.

Existing in French and German (older versions only, 5.5 is English-only)

XHTML 1.0 Support