BBEdit HTML Tools v2

Setting Your Preferences

Before starting to do any serious work with the tools, I suggest that you set your preferences first. This allows the full range of functionality in the tools. To set your preferences, open BBEdit's Preferences window (Edit -> Preferences...), and select the 'HTML' preference pane. You should see the following fields... The most important of these fields are the 'Server', 'Path' and 'Root' settings. If you wish to use templates and 'include' files, then setting the 'Template' preference is important too.

What to do...

The preferences are designed to allow you to edit and build your web site as easily as possible.

Server:

Firstly, enter the address of your server in the server field. This should be in the form:

http://your.server.address/

Path:

If you are using an Internet Service Provider, and rent space on their server (or for someother reason wish to manage a subdirectory on the server), then you will need to enter the path to your area on the server in the 'Server Path' field, eg:

web/user/yourArea/
or...
~yourArea/

Root:

Now that you have specified details about your server, you need to locate the folder (on any mountable volume) that you are going to use as a 'mirror' of your web site. It is in this directory that you edit the html documents for the server you specified earlier.

This folder should correspond to the top-most directory that you have control of on your server. Thus, if I control the whole server, then my root directory corresponds with the root directory of the server. If I rent space on a server, then my root directory corresponds with the top-most directory in my rented area (as specified in the 'Path' setting.

Template:

You will find details of how to use templates in another document, but for the time being, you can select the 'HTML Templates' folder that was installed in your BBEdit folder.

HTML Tools Palette:

If you now select the 'Startup' pane in BBEdit's preferences window, you can specify whether you want the HTML Tools Palette to open at startup or not. If it you have set it not to open at startup, you can open it at any time by accessing it from the Internet (globe) menu.