PHP Issue

[Karl]

Hi Gang,

My dev team has used Frontpage 2002 for the past two years to develop a
web-based application for my company. The project is well over 150,000 lines
of code, and FP2002 has worked like a charm. Recently, we updated to FP2003.
Since then we have run into some very serious problems with how FP2003 deals
with PHP code.

As PHP tags we use "<?" and "?>" and FP2002 recognizes them without problem.
FP2003, however, does not appear to recognize these tags, and converts them
to "& l t ; ?" and "? & g t ;" respectively (spaces added);

<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="client_name" value="<?echo "John Smith";?>">

becomes...

<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="client_name" value="& l t ; ?echo & q u o t;John
Smith& q u o t;;? & g t ;"?>">

Note: I added spaces so that this forum would display things correctly.

We do not want to change all 150,000+ lines of code of our project to
accomodate FP2003, and we do not want to go back to FP2002, so the only
options I see are somehow making FP2003 recognize tags as FP2002 did, or
dropping FP for another web editor.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-Karl Cox

 

[John Cello]

Karl:

You can use PHP in FP2003, but you have to "tell" it you are doing so. See
the article at
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA011092991033.aspx.
Specifically to what you're running into, you'll have to perform a couple of
tweaks.

Hope this helps.

 

[Karl]

Thanks for your reply. I read this acticle, and the "Change settings in
FrontPage 2003" section appeared to be what I needed. After further reading,
however, this does not offer a solution for my issue. Here is the only part
of this article that mentions the issue that we are experiencing:

===============
Use ASP-like <% and %> tags instead of the <? php?> tags. This stops
FrontPage from reformatting your PHP code.

Note As an alternative, you can use <script language="php"> and </script>
tags instead of <? php?> tags.
===============

From this statement (located in the "Enable and use ASP-style <% %> code
delimiters" area of the "Change settings in Frontpage 2003" section) it
sounds like it is not possible to use <? and ?> tags in FP2003 without FP
"reformatting" the code. This is very distressing to us, because we want to
be able to us the PHP code we created in FP2002 with FP2003, but it sounds
like this will not be possible.

Also, here is some misc information:
-We have already configured FP2003 to open PHP files in design view.
-the php.ini file on the server is already set with asp_tags="1"

My goal here is to be able to use my existing php tags ("<?" and "?>") with
FP 2003.

 

[John Cello]

Karl:

Unfortunately, I believe this is all the "support" that FP2003 is going to
provide for PHP. It looks as though you are going to be forced to use FPs
Find and Replace feature to make your PHP code more ASP like.

(Interesting that evil is often represented by an asp, isn't it?)

Good luck.