#title "Overview"
A lot of people use BBEdit to create websites. For example, WebMonkey chose it as their <a href="http://www.webmonkey.com/webmonkey/toolbox/texteditors/">favorite HTML editor</a>. That alone makes it worth an investigation.

Another reason we like BBEdit is that Rich Siegel, the lead developer at Bare Bones, is a friend! They have been very supportive of Frontier. There are lots of neat hooks in BBEdit to take advantage of. 

We have also spent some time with people from <a href="http://www.netobjects.com/">NetObjects</a>, talking about how to adapt our publishing system for Fusion users. We want to find a way to bridge the geekish power of Frontier for the graphic designers who are flocking to Fusion. 

Look at the Netobjects site, you'll see how much they have learned about colorful, eye-pleasing page design. 

We already have the hooks in BBEdit, so it was the sensible place to start the exploration. This is the second version of the connection between BBEdit and Frontier. The first version was developed in April 1996, and released as part of Frontier 4.0 in May 1996.

<h4>What we learned</h4>

There are all sizes of sites. Even smallish sites can benefit from more coordinated tools. Frontier's website framework is good for very large, managed, automated sites. BBEdit and other HTML page editors can benefit from a "lite" version of the website techniques implemented in Frontier.

I tried to imagine the kinds of tools the developers at the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/">CNN</a> website needed. From various email exchanges and from viewing the source on their web pages, it's clear that they're doing a lot of HTML work by hand, people doing things that computers are better at.

On a typical large website, there are three kinds of people involved: graphic designers, people who use PhotoShop and Fusion; technical people who use BBEdit and some of whom use Frontier; and (the largest number) writers, who create the stories, press releases, fact sheets, that appear on the site.

This software is designed to help the technical people coordinate the work of the designers and the writers, making the web site flow more smoothly, making larger more dynamic, efficiently managed sites possible.

<h4>Rendering</h4>

A key new concept -- pages are rendered. There's a difference between the text you edit and the HTML text that the software generates. 

Think of your folder of BBEdit text files as the <b>source</b> of your website, they are different from the files that will actually be served from your web server.

We create static web pages that can be economically served on any kind of web server, running on Unix or Windows NT or a Macintosh. We do not depend on any kind of runtime macro capability, however will will not interfere if you use server-side macros or includes.

<h4>Basic features</h4>

Here's a summary of the features you get when you render web pages thru the Frontier scripting engine.

<ul>
<li>All text flows thru a common template, making it easy to manage larger sites with a common look, and to change the look when you need to.

<li>A powerful macro language that runs while your pages are being built.

<li>An extensible database of glossary terms, that you can refer to in "double-quotes" in your HTML text.

<li>Automatic enabling of URLs and mail addresses.

<li>Automatic substitution of special Macintosh characters for the equivalent HTML codes.

<li>Integrates BBEdit with your web browser software by putting new authoring commands the browser's menu bar.

<li>Full source for all scripts are included, so all the features can be customized. The scripts have been designed to be modified and extended.
</ul>