by Eric Ladd
There's a lot more to administering a Web site than just authoring HTML pages. You need to be able to change the structure of the site to mesh with new content. Users will look to you for interactive components such as site search engines and threaded discussion groups. And even the HTML part of site administration can be difficult. If you move just one file, you have to check the whole site for links to the file and change the URL in the tags that set up the links.
To address this need, Microsoft has released FrontPage-the Web site management tool of the Microsoft Office suite of programs. FrontPage's many features give you end-to-end assistance during the site creation process. This chapter focuses on the highlights of FrontPage, including how to use the FrontPage Explorer to design the structure of your site, and the FrontPage Editor to create attractive Web pages.
Microsoft FrontPage is actually a collection of programs that support Web site managers in the various aspects of their jobs. After you install FrontPage, you can run the following programs:
The FrontPage Editor is a WYSIWYG Web page editor that lets you compose pages easily-even if you don't know HTML! You can get a handle on the structure of your Web site by using the FrontPage Explorer. The Explorer can show you your site in both hierarchical and graphical views. The FrontPage TCP/IP Test checks your machine for a Winsock layer, IP address, and other items needed to establish a connection to the Internet. This information can be used in support of the Personal Web Server and Server Administrator-two programs you can use to turn your machine into a World Wide Web server.
FrontPage packs a lot of power and you will need to run it on a machine that is capable of supporting it. FrontPage requires the following:
Once you have sufficient hardware power, and you are ready to
install FrontPage, you will need to pay $149 for the package.
Microsoft has advertised that this price is good until March 31,
1997, and that owners of Microsoft Office or one of the Office
component programs will receive a $40 rebate. The FrontPage Server
Extensions will be available free of charge.
| NOTE |
To get the most up-to-date information on FrontPage pricing, retail availability, and evaluation copies of the software, point your browser to http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/. |
You install FrontPage with a fairly standard Microsoft installation program. If you have downloaded an evaluation copy of FrontPage from Microsoft's Web site, run the file you downloaded. This is a self-extracting archive that places the necessary installation files on your machine. Then, find and run the setup.exe file to install FrontPage.
In the course of the installation, you will be asked if you want to perform a Typical or a Custom installation. A Typical installation will install all parts of FrontPage: the Explorer, the Editor, the Personal Web Server, and the server extensions. If this is your first time installing FrontPage, you'll probably want to opt for all of the components.
If you choose a Custom installation, you can specify which components
you want installed. You might do this to prevent a previously
installed component from being reinstalled. Another reason to
choose a Custom installation is because you already have a Web
server running on your machine and you don't want to use the Personal
Web Server. This isn't a problem, because FrontPage is able to
work with many popular server programs. However, you'll have to
install the FrontPage server extensions appropriate to your server
software for the interaction to be seamless.
| NOTE |
It's critical that FrontPage work in conjunction with some type of server program for the FrontPage Web bots and other pre-programmed functionality to work properly. |
When considering whether or not to install both the FrontPage Explorer and the FrontPage Editor, you need to consider what type of authoring tasks you need to complete. If you're only going to be developing Web pages, and not an entire site, you can just go with the Editor. Developing an entire Web site will require you to install both the Explorer and the Editor since you'll need the Explorer to set up your site's structure. The Explorer helps you do this with several preconfigured site templates and wizards.
Another issue to consider is whether you plan to develop your site offline (outside the server) or online. Many developers choose to build their sites offline using the Explorer and the Editor, and port them to a server when they're done. If you're going to do this, you will need to make sure your server is properly configured to handle it.
Once you configure the installation, the install program will place FrontPage in its own directory and create separate directories for the Personal Web Server and any Web sites you create. If you have set up the installation to place a program group-and it's a good idea to do this-you'll see a set of options like the one shown in Figure 19.1. There will be one icon in the program group for each FrontPage component you choose to install.
| NOTE |
During the installation, you will also be prompted to provide an administrator's password. The Web Administrator grants authoring access to all other users, so be sure to take the proper precautions to keep the password secure. |
Now that you're ready to get started, you will most likely want to begin with the FrontPage Explorer. The Explorer, with an interface very much like that of the Windows Explorer in Windows 95, helps you set up and add content to a Web site.
When you start up the FrontPage Explorer, you will see the screen shown in Figure 19.2. The two major areas of the window-the Outline View and the Link View-provide two very different ways of looking at a Web site or, in FrontPage vernacular, a Web. With no Web loaded, the Explorer window is largely empty, so your first step is to give yourself something to work with.
Figure 19.2 : At startup, the FrontPage Explorer displays Outline and Link Views of a Web site.
| CAUTION |
Before you start working on a Web, make sure you have a Web server program running. The Personal Web Server that comes bundled with FrontPage is fine for this purpose. Versions 1.1 and later of FrontPage will launch the Personal Web Server automatically when it is needed. You can get the Explorer to run without a Web server present, but you will lose the pre-programmed functions if you do. |
To start a new Web, choose File, New Web or click the New Web toolbar button. You will then see the dialog box shown in Figure 19.3. From the box, you can choose one of six Web templates or one of two Web wizards. These include
Figure 19.3 : The Explorer gives you eight different options when creating a new Web.
If you're creating a Web with a purpose that's consistent with
one of the templates or wizards, then choose that template or
wizard. If you have existing pages that you want to assemble into
a Web, your best bet is to choose the Empty Web and place your
pages into it. To begin with a blank page that you can place content
on, select the Normal Web option.
| NOTE |
The Normal Web template is the default choice when creating a new Web. |
| NOTE |
When you create a new Web, you'll be required to supply the IP address of your server, a unique name for the Web, and the Web administrator's name and password. |
Suppose you're designing your corporation's Web site and you want to use the Corporate Presence Wizard to help you set it up. Select the Corporate Presence Wizard option in the New Web dialog box and click OK. After you supply the server address, Web name, and administrator's password, the Explorer walks you through a series of dialog boxes which poll you for
| NOTE |
Most of the information you supply to the Wizard will be used to create a structure for the Web. It's up to you to go back in and add the content. |
With the exhausting sequence of dialog boxes complete, the Explorer now has enough information to compose your Web. If you asked for the To Do List to be displayed each time the Web is loaded, you'll see the dialog box in Figure 19.4, showing you what pages are left to complete. The Explorer puts these tasks in the list automatically, but you're free to add other tasks to the list as you encounter them.
Once you close out the list, you will see the Explorer window shown in Figure 19.5. The default display shows the Outline and Link Views of your newly created Web.
Figure 19.5 : The Corporate Presence Wizard builds this Web based on your input.
Once you have loaded a Web into the Explorer, you can examine it in different ways: the Outline View, the Link View, and the Summary View. Each view, and its respective advantages, are briefly discussed over the next three sections.
The Outline View The Outline View is always found in the left side of the Explorer window (refer to Figure 19.5). It shows a hierarchical view of your Web site, in much the same way as the left side of the Windows Explorer shows you the hierarchical folder structure on your hard drive. If you click a plus sign (+), it expands the hierarchy found below the object with the plus sign. Clicking a minus sign (-) collapses an expanded hierarchy.
If you're using a "drill-down" kind of design for your
site, the Outline View gives you the best way to look at it. If
you're looking for a certain page, you can follow the hierarchy
right to it. The outline structure also makes it easy to see the
most logical places to insert new pages.
| TIP |
If you're tracking images, you can toggle Links to Images from the Explorer toolbar. |
The Link View The Link View is the default view on the right side of the Explorer window (refer to Figure 19.5). This view depicts your site more graphically by indicating, with arrows, links to other pages within the site and off the site. You can click items whose icons have a plus (+) sign to expand the Link View further.
The Link View makes it easy to see how your documents are linked
together, and where you might be missing some critical links.
Also, if you're looking for broken links that are pointed out
by the Explorer link checker, this is the view you want to use.
| TIP |
Clicking a page in the Outline View moves it to the center of the Link View. |
The Summary View By clicking the Summary View toolbar button, or by choosing View, Summary View, you change the right side of the Explorer window to the Summary View (see Figure 19.6). The Summary View is very much like the right side of the Windows Explorer window, as it details document-specific information such as titles, file names and sizes, last change dates, who made the most recent edits, and the document's URL.
The Summary View can be handy in a number of situations. The last change date information can tell you how "fresh" information is on a page or whether a person responsible for an update has made the necessary changes. File size information is important for graphics and multimedia files and the Summary View can help you identify files that are too big to be part of your Web.
Visiting a Web site that has broken or outdated links can be one of a Web surfer's most frustrating experiences. It's frustrating for the site administrator, too. Keeping track of all links on a large site requires incredible attention to detail. Keeping track of links to other sites is all but impossible without checking each link individually on a regular basis. Fortunately for both parties, the FrontPage Explorer comes with some link utilities that help to alleviate these problems.
Verify Links Choosing Tools, Verify Links instructs the Explorer to perform a check on all of the links in your Web, including links to pages that are not on your Web. The Explorer reports its findings back to you in a window like the one you see in Figure 19.7. Links to pages within your site are hightlighted with a red circle and the word "Broken" if they are broken, and are not shown at all if they are working. Links that couldn't be checked are highlighted with a yellow circle and a question mark in front of them. To verify these links, click the Verify button you see in the dialog box.
You can verify each external link by selecting it in the window
and clicking the Verify button. If an external link is verified,
the Explorer places a green circle with the work "OK"
in front of the link. If an external link is broken, it gets a
red circle with the word "Broken."
| TIP |
If you're using a To Do List to track your site management tasks, you can select a broken link and click the Add Task button to assign the task to a member of your team. |
| NOTE |
If a link to an external site is broken, you should contact the site's Webmaster to find out if the page has a new URL or is no longer available. |
Checking your links frequently is a critical site maintenance activity that can't be stressed enough. When a user hits a dead link, it's much like slamming into a wall. If users come to associate that type of experience with your site, it's unlikely that they will return during later browsing sessions.
Recalculate Links The Recalculate Links command (choose Tools, Recalculate Links) updates the displays in each of the three views to reflect any changes made by you or other authors. Specifically, the Recalculate Links command does the following three things:
| NOTE |
Link recalculation actually occurs on the Personal Web Server that comes as part of the FrontPage suite, or on any server using FrontPage extensions. Once the server has finished recalculating, control returns back to the Explorer |
| CAUTION |
Be patient during recalculation. If you recalculate for a large Web, it could take several minutes to complete the operation |
The FrontPage Explorer comes with some other handy features that can make your life as a Web site administrator much easier. These include the following:
With your Web created, it's time to put some content on its component pages. You do this by using the FrontPage Editor-a full-featured, WYSIWYG page composition program.
When you fire up the FrontPage Editor, you see a WYSIWYG environment in which you can create your Web documents-all without even typing an HTML tag.
If you are a veteran HTML programmer who's used to having access
to the source code you write, you may find using the FrontPage
Editor a little frustrating. When you work with the Editor, you
rarely see an HTML tag. You can look at the code that the Editor
has generated for you by choosing View, HTML, but you can't edit
the code you see! To do that, you need to save the file and then
reopen it in a text editor or an HTML editor that allows you to
tweak the code.
| CAUTION |
If you use an external editor, you run the risk of losing the code because FPEditor will strip out non-supported code the next time it is run. Use the HTML Markup Bot to add unsupported code. |
When you select File, New to start a new document, you don't just get a blank screen to work in. Rather, you are given the option to activate one of the Editor's many templates and page creation wizards. Templates give you a structured document with several informational "holes" that you can fill in with appropriate text (see Figure 19.8). Page creation wizards collect information from you through a series of dialog boxes and then use the information you supply to author a page.
Figure 19.9 shows a dialog box from the Frames Wizard-a useful feature for developing framed pages without having to worry about all of those confusing <FRAMESET> tags.
| NOTE |
There are only a few standard framed layouts to choose from though, so you may not find your desired layout prepackaged in FrontPage. In this case, you'll have to set it up yourself by using the Frames Wizard's Edit Frameset Grid and Edit Frame Attributes options. |
| CAUTION |
The FrontPage Editor WYSIWYG display is limited in that it cannot render a framed page. |
The FrontPage Editor comes with two other wizards-Forms Page and Personal Home Page. The Forms Wizard is quite handy and can spare you much of the drudgery of coding a form. Many common form fields come prepackaged and all you need to do is place them on your form. This isn't very helpful if the prepackaged form fields don't include the types of fields you need, but FrontPage also lets you build a customized form from the ground up. You can pass the form results to a CGI script or you can use the FrontPage Save Results bot to write the form data to a file. Results can be saved in HTML, plain text, or rich text formats.
The Personal Home Page Wizard walks you through a sequence of dialog boxes to gather information to create a personal Web page. The personal page that FrontPage can generate for you is more like a resume than your average Web page, as it includes page elements like "Employee Information" and "Current Projects." If you want to author a more typical home page, you might want to skip FrontPage's Home Page Wizard.
In addition to the wizards, FrontPage can get you started with more than twenty standard page templates, including the following:
Corporate site designers can make good use of a number of these templates. Specifically, press releases and press release directories, guest books, tables of contents, and What's New pages are frequently found on corporate sites.
Once you have a document started, or have loaded one in from an existing Web, you can make use of the Editor's many useful features to create or change the page.
The Editor Toolbars Figure 19.10 shows the Editor with all of its toolbars active. Many are just like the toolbar buttons you would see in other Microsoft Office applications. Others that are more specific to HTML authoring are labeled with callouts in the figure.
Figure 19.10 : FrontPage's Editor supports document authoring with four different toolbars.
Of particular note are the Image toolbar and the Forms toolbar.
When you select an image on the page, the Image toolbar becomes
active and allows you to trace hot regions for image maps, or
to make a color in the image transparent. The Forms toolbar places
form controls at the cursor's position on your page. You can also
launch the FrontPage Explorer or your To Do List with Editor toolbar
buttons.
| TIP |
You can toggle the display of any of the toolbars under the Editor View menu. |
Formatting Text You can apply styles to text in many different ways. The physical styles are available to the right on the toolbar. All you need to do is highlight the text to format and click the appropriate button. The Style drop-down box works similarly and gives you access to a much greater range of styles, including heading and list styles.
Next to the physical style toolbar buttons are the Text Color button, which lets you paint highlighted text with a different color, and the Increase/Decrease Text Size buttons.
For several formatting options at once, select Format, Characters to reveal the dialog box you see in Figure 19.11. Clicking different styles in this box applies them to highlighted text.
While most text formatting in the Editor is straightforward, there are a few issues you should keep in mind. For example, when you cut a piece of text and paste it somewhere else, the formatting is not always retained, meaning you'll have to go back through and reformat it. This suggests that you might want to get all of your plain text where you want it first and then apply your formatting.
Another issue is text color. Text colors may not be displayed
correctly in FrontPage, depending on what color resolution you're
using in Windows 95. You may have to experiment with the Windows
color palette, switching between 256 colors and high color to
paint your text with the color you want. If you're using 16 colors,
you may have trouble getting page elements painted on-screen exactly
as you want them. In this case, you should check the page on a
browser that is running on a system with more colors.
| NOTE |
Even with a WYSIWYG editor, you need to test your pages often in Web browsers-Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, as well as other browsers you suspect will be used to view your site's pages. Not only will different browsers interpret the color palette somewhat differently, but text formatting can also vary. |
When you use the Enter key to insert vertical space between page
elements, it will be interpreted as a paragraph break (or <P>
tag) in your HTML code. If you just want a line break (or <BR>
tag), you have to insert that manually by choosing Insert, Line
Break.
| TIP |
Some text elements are best handled outside of the Editor. If you have text elements that are common to each page, such as copyright information or a Webmaster e-mail address, you may want to consider copying and pasting these items into your pages, using a plain text editor like Notepad. The FrontPage Editor can take a long time to load an entire page because it also loads images. A plain text editor just loads the HTML code and is therefore much faster. |
Inserting Images To place an image on your page, choose Insert, Image to open the dialog box you see in Figure 19.12. In the box, you get the option to load the file from a local drive or from an URL, so you can pull down any image you want from the Web.
Figure 19.12 : You can place images from local or remote sources in your FrontPage Editor document.
By default, the image is placed at the current cursor location and is left-justified with an ALIGN value of BOTTOM (text next to the image will line up with the bottom of the image). You can exercise greater control over the placement of the image in the image's Properties box. To reveal the image's properties, double-click the image or right-click the image and select the Properties option you see in the context-sensitive pop-up menu. The Image Properties dialog box, shown in Figure 19.13, allows you to specify image alignment, border size, horizontal and vertical spacing, low-resolution and text alternatives for the image, and if it is hyperlinked, what URL it is linked to.
Figure 19.13 : An image's Properties dialog box gives you finer control over image attributes.
| CAUTION |
If you tweak your HTML code in a plain text editor, you may encounter some problems. FrontPage sets image WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes automatically. If you change the SRC attribute of an <IMG> tag in a text editor without changing the WIDTH and HEIGHT, the image will be displayed with the dimensions of the previous image and look distorted. Be sure to change WIDTH and HEIGHT values if you change the image file you're using. Alternately, you can re-load the changed file into FrontPage and it will automatically reset these attributes. |
| TIP |
If you need to build in properties to your <IMG> tag that aren't included in the Image Properties dialog box-such as the DYNSRC and LOOP attributes for AVI video with Internet Explorer-click the Extended button in the dialog box and type the attributes in by hand. You can also do this through the HTML Markup Bot. |
Image handling in the FrontPage Editor requires a bit of explanation. If you click an image once, you have selected it. Once selected, you can copy or cut the image, trace out image map hot regions on the image, or choose a transparent color. To delete the image, however, you need to highlight it (pass over it from left to right with the cursor and the mouse button held down) first and then press the Delete key.
The Editor also seems to have a limit on the amount of image data it can handle. Some users have reported crashes after they have placed a large number of small images or a few very large images on their pages. As you load a page with images, be sure to save it frequently in the event of it overloading the program.
Setting Up Hyperlinks To create hypertext, highlight the text to serve as the anchor and click the Create or Edit Link toolbar button. You'll then see a dialog box like the one in Figure 19.14. In the box, you can choose to link to a page that is currently open in the Editor, a page that is part of the Web that you're working on, any page on the World Wide Web, or a page that you ask the Editor to create for you.
If you need to change the attributes of a link, you can right-click
it and select the Properties option from the pop-up menu you see.
| CAUTION |
Setting up internal links can be a challenge, especially if you've edited some of the HTML in a plain text editor. The FrontPage Editor tends to "lose" any internal page anchors (<A NAME="anchor_name">) that it doesn't set up itself. Thus, any anchors you've configured in a program like Notepad will be ignored, even though they're clearly right there in the HTML file. |
To color your links, right-click anywhere on the page and select the Page Properties option to reveal the dialog box you see in Figure 19.15. Options in the Customize Appearance part of the box enable you to paint your visited, unvisited, and active links with whatever color you choose.
| NOTE |
A link is "active" only in the instant that the user clicks it. |
| NOTE |
You can also set up titles, base URLs and targets, text color, and <META> tags from the Page Properties dialog box. |
Setting up a linked image is virtually the same as setting up
linked text. Simply click the image you want to link and then
click the Create or Edit Link button to open the dialog box, which
was shown in Figure 19.14. If you're setting up an image map,
click the image once to select it and then use the tools on the
Image toolbar to set up the different hot regions. After you trace
out a hot region, the Editor will display the same dialog box
you saw in Figure 19.14 so you can enter the URL to associate
with the hot region.
| NOTE |
The FrontPage Editor uses client-side image maps. If you need to implement a server-side image map, look at the HTML source code to get the hot region coordinates and then type out your map file by hand. |
Creating Tables To insert a table, choose Table, Insert Table or click the Insert Table toolbar button. When you do, you'll see a dialog box like the one in Figure 19.16. After entering the table size, border size, alignment, padding, and spacing attributes, the Editor will place a blank table in your document (see Figure 19.17) inside of which you can fill in the cells with text, images, form fields, and even other tables.
Figure 19.16 : You set up a table in your document by filling out the Insert Table dialog box.
| NOTE |
Most of the options under the Table menu are grayed out unless the cursor is in a table cell. |
You can delete the content of individual cells of a table by highlighting them and pressing Delete, but it is more of a challenge to delete an entire table. Even if you remove all cell contents, FrontPage still leaves you with an empty table on screen and all of the related table tags in the HTML code. To remove the entire table, double-click your mouse just to the left of the table to highlight the whole thing. Once highlighted, you can press Delete to remove the entire table from both your screen and your HTML code.
You can color the individual cells in your tables, thanks to HTML extensions now supported by Netscape's and Microsoft's browser products. To color a cell, right-click inside the cell and choose Cell Properties from the pop-up menu that appears. Next, click the Extended button you see in the Cell Properties dialog box and enter the BGCOLOR attribute and its desired value.
Coloring the individual cells can overstate the "block-like"
nature of the cells. To reduce this effect, you may want to color
your table cells with the same color you use to color your page
background.
| CAUTION |
The way FrontPage displays a table is not exactly the same as the way Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer would do it. If you make a substantial change to a table, be sure to look at it in a browser to determine if you've achieved the desired effect. |
Web bots are preprogrammed dynamic objects that run when you save a file or when a user views your file online. The FrontPage Editor comes with several bots that you can build into your pages, including
Bots are unique in that their functionality is built right into FrontPage. This is very different from programming that supports similar functions, as these programs are typically written separate from the coding of the HTML. FrontPage integrates these two activities into one.
Much of the power of the FrontPage suite is derived from its set of standard bots. Additionally, you can write your own bots by using the FrontPage Software Developer's Kit.
To save your document for the first time, select File, Save As to open the dialog box shown in Figure 19.18. Notice that in this box you can save the document as a normal file or as a document template. Clicking OK will save the file to your current Web. If you want to save the page as a separate file, click the As File button and specify the name of the file to save the page to.
Content management is certainly a key part of Web site administration, but you need to have a handle on your hardware and software resources as well. The FrontPage suite comes equipped with programs to assist you with the technical side of site management, including
The FrontPage TCP/IP Test program does a quick check for your machine's host name, IP address, and other information required for it to act as a Web server on the Internet. When you start the TCP/IP Test, you see the dialog box shown in Figure 19.19. To start the test, click the button that says Start Test.
When the test has finished, the empty boxes on the left side of the dialog box fill with the words "Yes" or "No," depending on what the program was able to find. If you click the Explain Results button, you get an explanation of the test results in plain English (see Figure 19.20).
Figure 19.20 : The TCP/IP Test program explains the test results to you in easy-to-understand terms.
A Web server program's main responsibility is to field requests for Web pages from client programs such as Internet Explorer and send the pages to the requesting program. Since this isn't a highly visible activity, a Web server often runs "in the background" with no on-screen display of what's going on.
This is the case with FrontPage's Personal Web Server program. When it is active, it usually sits on your Task Bar. The label on the Task Bar will read "idle" if the server isn't doing anything, and "busy" if it is serving pages. If you click the Task Bar item for the Personal Web Server, you'll see the window shown in Figure 19.21. The only two menu options are File, Exit and Help, About Web Server-both of which are pretty self-explanatory.
Figure 19.21 : This is the only screen you'll ever see when running the Personal Web Server.
Your best use of the Personal Web Server is as a way to test your Webs before you make them publicly available. Using the Personal Web Server to view your Web in a browser is an important final test of your site. Once a Web is ready to go, you may want it served by a server with a little more "horsepower," like a Netscape server product or the Microsoft Internet Information Server.
Even though the Personal Web Server doesn't seem to be as "high-profile" as the Editor or the Explorer, it does have some desirable features, including the following:
| NOTE |
To have your computer act as a Web server, you need to connect it to the Internet. Since most home users can't afford a dedicated Internet connection, it's likely that you won't be able to have your server running all of the time. Make sure people know when you intend to have your server available. |
The more visible side of having a Web server is seen in the Server Administrator program (see Figure 19.22). Some important information is displayed near the top of the Administrator window. In particular, the location of your server's configuration file (usually named something like httpd.conf) is shown, along with the current server directory, and whether authoring has been enabled on the active server port.
| NOTE |
Most Web servers use port 80, though it's possible to configure a server to use a different one. |
From the Server Administrator window, you can perform the following administrator functions by pushing the buttons you see in the figure:
When you install FrontPage, it really only works with a few Web servers. These include
To harness the full functionality of FrontPage using a different server program, you need to install FrontPage server extensions. By communicating with other servers through the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), server extensions help FrontPage talk to these servers "in their language" to ensure that all of FrontPage's features work seamlessly with the servers.
Initially, Microsoft charged $200 for each set of server extensions,
but now they are available free of charge. The server extensions
currently available are shown in Table 19.1.
| Operating System | Web Servers |
| Solaris 2.4 | NCSA, CERN, Apache, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server, Open Market Web Server |
| SunOS 4.1.3 | NCSA, CERN, Apache, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server, Open Market Web Server |
| IRIX 5.3 | NCSA, CERN, Apache, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server, Open Market Web Server |
| HP/UX 9.03 | NCSA, CERN, Apache, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server, Open Market Web Server |
| BSD/OS 2.1 | NCSA, CERN, Apache, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server, Open Market Web Server |
| Windows 95 | Personal Web Server, O'Reilly & Associates' WebSite version 1.1 |
| Windows NT | Personal Web Server, O'Reilly & Associates' WebSite version 1.1, Netscape Commerce Server, Netscape Communications Server |
| Windows NT Server | Microsoft Internet Information Server |
| NOTE |
FrontPage 1.1 only comes with server extensions for the Netscape Communications Server, version 1.12, and the Netscape Commerce Server for Windows NT. FrontPage supports the Netscape Commerce Server, but does not yet support Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). You'll need to disable SSL in the Commerce Server before using it with FrontPage. |
Once the appropriate set of server extensions is installed, it
is simple to copy a Web between platforms and to other servers,
while preserving all programming, access controls, and image maps.
| TIP |
If you can't get a copy of the server extensions appropriate to your server software, you can try Microsoft's FrontPage Publishing Wizard. The Wizard will examine a page to see if any content requires a FrontPage server extension to be served correctly. For more information, direct your browser to http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/freestuff/fs_fp_pbwiz.htm. |
Microsoft has made its FrontPage Software Developer's Kit publicly available to end users and developers who want to
Creating new templates is the simplest of the above activities.
By being able to make your own Web and page templates, you're
no longer constrained to the standard templates that come with
FrontPage. So, if you have a particular site structure you use
frequently, or if you want a framed layout different from the
ones that are prepackaged in the Frames Wizard, you can create
an appropriate template to use instead.
| TIP |
The Software Developer's Kit comes with a Visual Basic program called Web Template Maker that can assist you in creating a template. |
Other Developer's Kit functions require greater technical sophistication.
Users wanting to create their own wizards and bots should be versed
in an appropriate programming language like Microsoft Visual Basic
or Visual C++ and in ActiveX controls. Knowledge of CGI is also
useful for those who are writing bots
| NOTE |
To download the FrontPage Software Developer's Kit, point your browser to http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/freestuff/fs_fp_sdk.htm.. |