The future of FrontPage / FrontPage Extensions

[ChuckN]

I am not a professional web site developer. I have found FrontPage very
easy to work with and developed on our website which was very successful.

We recently used a website developer to design our new website which is also
very well done. I will be maintaining and updating the website.

Our website developer doesn't seem to understand IIS or FrontPage, and
wanted to use PHP to develop the simple data entry page similar to what we
had used for years with FrontPage. Although we installed PHP on the server
and PHP worked, his data entry page didn't work. I used FrontPage to
recreate his page using FrontPage extensions and it works great. He was
surprised FrontPage could do that.

I recently upgraded our software to Expression Web. It seems to be very
good software for a professional, but is not very user friendly for the
"casual" user like me.

My questions are these:

I understand FrontPage extension will no longer be supported after 2009. Is
that true?

Using a "Form" and "Forms Fields" in FrontPage and Expression Web is fairly
easy. Why isn't something similar available in Expression Web that does not
use FrontPage Extensions if those are being phased out because of
compatibility problems?

It seems there should be a wizard or some other application that will create
a more compatible web application script to do the same thing. Is there
some place I can go to get access to scripts or applications that can easily
be incorporated into our website to allow us to achieve the more basic
applications?

Is PHP the way to go? I am wary of freeware - particularly when new
operating systems are released, how long will it take for freeware to be
updated to be compatible?

Any recommendations/comments would be appreciated.

 

[Chris Leeds, MVP - FrontPage]

I'm pretty sure that as EW matures the development team will replicate a lot
of the features users liked in FrontPage but do it with asp.net (maybe even
php also).
there's lots of places on the net where you can get free scripts and
tutorials on how to do things like you're mentioning.
as far as PHP goes, don't be afraid of it as if it were some kind of cheap
freeware. while it is free, it's very very good.

HTH

--
Chris Leeds
Contact: http://chrisleeds.com/contact
Have you seen ContentSeed (www.contentseed.com)?
NOTE:
This message was posted from an unmonitored email account.
This is an unfortunate necessity due to high volumes of spam sent to email
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Sorry for any inconvenience.

 

[Ronx]

"Official" Microsoft support for FrontPage extensions depends on which
platform you are hosted on:

Unix, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Pro (32bit): Support ended in
June 2006.

Windows XP Pro (64bit): There is a downloadable version of the 2002
extensions on the Microsoft site for all 64bit Windows operating
systems.

Windows 2003 Server: Full support ends 2 years after Windows 2008 Server
goes retail. This end of full support is expected to be in 2010.
Extended support will continue for 5 years after that (if current
Microsoft support policies are not changed.)

Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008: A version of the extensions has
been produced for IIS7.

Whether hosts will install and maintain the extensions is entirely up to
the hosts, and always has been.


It is not easy to provide a form handler that works on every server -
the extensions do that, but maintenance is a nightmare for some hosts
that do not understand them. Form handlers have to run on the server
(Unix and Windows), and process the form data. asp.Net will run on both
Windows and Unix, provided the host is willing to install all the
required bits - Mono for Unix and the asp.Net framework for Windows.
The built in features of EW will save data to a database with little or
no coding using asp.Net, but getting it to email depends again on what
the host has installed - that is not built in to the .Net frameworks,
and hosts often disable that feature in the extensions anyway.

Following on From Chris' post, Expression Web is more geared to
standards compliant web sites. The FrontPage extensions use some
non-standard code in places. In view of the reluctance for hosts to
maintain the extensions other technologies are the way to go forward.
Expression Web supports asp.Net 2.0, and in version 2 will have some
support for PHP.

On the other hand, SharePoint Designer (the other replacement for
FrontPage) does fully support the extensions and FrontPage webbots, but
being aimed at SharePoint sites is unlikely to support PHP in future
versions, and does not have standards as its number 1 priority.

In my opinion, FrontPage is not very good for PHP unless you use asp
delimiters. But Expression Web does not have that failing.
--
Ron Symonds - Microsoft MVP (FrontPage)
Reply only to group - emails will be deleted unread.

http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp

 

[frank]

I am not a professional web site developer. I have found FrontPage
very easy to work with and developed on our website which was very
successful.

We recently used a website developer to design our new website which
is also very well done. I will be maintaining and updating the
website.

Our website developer doesn't seem to understand IIS or FrontPage,
and wanted to use PHP to develop the simple data entry page similar
to what we had used for years with FrontPage. Although we installed
PHP on the server and PHP worked, his data entry page didn't work. I
used FrontPage to recreate his page using FrontPage extensions and it
works great. He was surprised FrontPage could do that.

I recently upgraded our software to Expression Web. It seems to be
very good software for a professional, but is not very user friendly
for the "casual" user like me.

My questions are these:

I understand FrontPage extension will no longer be supported after
2009. Is that true?

Using a "Form" and "Forms Fields" in FrontPage and Expression Web is
fairly easy. Why isn't something similar available in Expression Web
that does not use FrontPage Extensions if those are being phased out
because of compatibility problems?

It seems there should be a wizard or some other application that will
create a more compatible web application script to do the same thing.
Is there some place I can go to get access to scripts or applications
that can easily be incorporated into our website to allow us to
achieve the more basic applications?

Is PHP the way to go? I am wary of freeware - particularly when new
operating systems are released, how long will it take for freeware to
be updated to be compatible?

Any recommendations/comments would be appreciated.

I am making my website , for my company that will start march 1, and i
am using FP2003. I have seen your website 'newmanarchtiecture.com' and
I was impressed that you can make this with frontpage.
I am now strugling with images in a table, aligned centered, and when I
crop the screen all absolute elements (in layers) are floating out of
the table.
Can you give me some tips&tricks to get nice tables? and what are Fp
extensions?
regards, Rob from the netherlands.

--

 

[Ronx]

Display problems are more easily solved when the page can be seen.
Please provide a link.

Layers use absolute positioning. If you have placed your images in
layers, and the layers are in table cells the result will be a mess when
the browser viewport is resized, or even when the text in the page is
resized.
From your brief description of the page, I would say - dispense with the
layers. Use the table cells to layout and position the images and text.
Using layers simply adds an unnecessary layer of complexity.

Images can be easily centred in table cells using align attributes or
cell padding.


FrontPage extensions are a server side set of programs that provide
additional functionality to the website, and also eases web management.
The additional functionality includes form processing, http publishing,
allows remote editing of a site, hit-counters etc. Most of these
functions can be achieved using other technologies - php, asp, asp.net
etc.
--
Ron Symonds - Microsoft MVP (FrontPage)
Reply only to group - emails will be deleted unread.

http://www.rxs-enterprises.org/fp