Using Microsoft FrontPage Introduction Note: This chapter refers to terms and concepts described in Microsoft's FrontPage documentation. It is important to familiarize yourself with the FrontPage software to understand this chapter in its context. If you are about to begin work on your Web site and wish to use FrontPage to manage it, all you need to do is create a Web using FrontPage Explorer, and publish it using FrontPage's Publish tool. After launching FrontPage Explorer, open the Web www.yourdomain.com and enter your Web Hosting User ID and Password. The first time you do this, the FrontPage server extensions will be automatically installed on your Web hosting account. You can now create pages and publish them as explained in Microsoft's FrontPage documentation. Using Microsoft FrontPage Adapting an Existing Web Site to Use FrontPage If you've been administrating your Web site without FrontPage and then decide that you'd like to start using FrontPage, follow the procedure below to safely set up your directories for use with FrontPage: To import an existing web into FrontPage Using FTP, copy all of your Web site files to your computer. Open the FrontPage Explorer, and select Create a New FrontPage Web from the Getting Started window. Select Import an Existing Web in step 1 of the New FrontPage Web window, and name it in step 2. Choose From a source directory... from the Import Web Wizard window, and click Browse to locate the files you copied to your PC in step 1 of this procedure. Delete all the Web site files from the www directory of www.yourdomain.com using FTP (where yourdomain is your Web Hosting Account domain name). Use the Publish feature of the FrontPage Explorer to publish the files on your PC to www.yourdomain.com Why You Should Not FTP Your Files to Your FrontPage Web Site To publish a Web site, use the Publish FrontPage Web option located under the File menu. Every FrontPage Web contains information that your FrontPage server uses to keep track of the pages in the Web, every link in the Web, and the relationships between one document and every other document. This information allows FrontPage to automatically update the links in one page when you move a file that the links point to. It also enables FrontPage's hyperlink verification tool and the "Web bot" features that come with FrontPage. The FrontPage server gathers this information when you publish a Web and catalogues the pages and the information they contain. If you use FTP rather than FrontPage to upload files to your Web site, you bypass this information-gathering process and FrontPage will not work correctly. This means that links won't be updated when you move files, hyperlinks won't be checked, and Web bots will not work. You may unintentionally cause your Personal Web Server to upload files to your Web site via FTP. To avoid this, make sure you are connected to the Internet before publishing. If you try to publish your Web site when you aren't connected to the Internet, FrontPage may ask you for the name of an FTP server. If you enter your domain name it will connect and FTP your Web site files to your web site. If you do inadvertently FTP your files, your Web bots will not work correctly until you have recalculated the links on your FrontPage Web. Also, since FrontPage remembers the settings from the last time you published, it will attempt to use FTP the next time you click the Publish button. If this situation occurs, the solution is to bypass the Publish button and choose Publish FrontPage Web from the File menu. Once you have successfully published your Web in this manner, you can go back to using the Publish button. Using FrontPage E-mail Forms By default the FrontPage 98 Personal Web Server on your computer is not configured to handle e-mail forms. As a result, you may see the following error: The FrontPage Server Extensions have not been configured to send e-mail. Please direct your system administrator or Internet Service Provider to follow the instructions at "Setting Up Your E-mail Transport" in the \SERK\enu\admin.htm file on the FrontPage CD-ROM. Would you like to remove the e-mail recipient? This error means that the FrontPage Server extensions on your PC are not configured to send e-mail. To configure FrontPage extensions to send e-mail Make sure that FrontPage is not currently running. Then, under Start -> Programs -> Accessories , launch the Notepad application. Under the File menu, choose Open . Under the Files of Type selection box at the bottom, make sure All Files (*.*) is selected. Find the file frontpg.ini (located in C:\windows). This file may also appear as Frontpg without an extension. Select Open . In the text edit box, scroll down until the cursor is one line below the line that says [FrontPage 3.0] Add the following configuration line: SMTPHost=smtp.mindspring.com Under File , choose Exit . When asked if you want to save your changes, select Yes . FrontPage should now be configured to handle e-mail forms. Why You Should Not Delete Server Extension Directories (_vti...) When you use an FTP program to log in to your Web Hosting Account, you will see several directories whose names start with an underscore (_). You will also see _vti directories throughout your site. All of these directories are important and many of them contain FrontPage Server Extensions. If you delete these directories FrontPage will no longer work for your Web Hosting Site. If you have accidentally (or intentionally) deleted your FrontPage Server Extension directories, follow the following procedure to recreate the extensions. To recreate FrontPage extensions Log in to your Web Hosting Account via FTP. Open the /conf directory. Delete the file named httpd.conf Log out. Open FrontPage Explorer to www.yourdomain.com (where yourdomain is your domain name). Log in with your Web Hosting User ID and password.This will cause your FrontPage extensions to be recreated, and you can administrate your FrontPage Webs as usual. What to Do about Extremely Long Publishing Times If you are publishing your Web site and it seems to have gotten stuck at a certain point for a long time, then you may have included a very large file on your site which FrontPage is trying to send to the Web server. Though FrontPage will try to transfer the file, the publishing operation may time out before it was completed. It is a good idea to be aware of the size of the files in your site to prevent this from happening. To avoid extended publishing times due to a large file, you may wish to use the Windows Explorer to move the large file to a separate directory on your computer (outside of your FrontPage Webs Content directory, and leave a place-holder file in its place. For example, if you have a 10 MB file named baby.avi in c:\FrontPage Webs\Content\baby.avi use Windows Explorer to move that file to c:\multimedia\baby.avi. Then create an empty text document named baby.avi and place in c:\FrontPage Webs\Content.avi. By creating this place-holder file, you are allowing FrontPage to create and maintain links to your multimedia file. Once you have published your site, use an FTP program to upload c:\multimedia\baby.avi to your Web Hosting Site, overwriting the place-holder file. Password Protecting Your Webs If you would like visitors to your FrontPage Web site to be required to enter a password, use the FrontPage password protection methods. Due to the differences between FrontPage password protection and the MindSpring Control Panel's Password Protection tool, using the Control Panel tool may cause problems with your FrontPage account. For more information on password protecting your Webs, refer to the official FrontPage documentation. Using FrontPage to Manage Larger Webs If your Web site contains more than one thousand files, you may begin to experience delays in moving, renaming or creating files. If these delays become an inconvenience, you may wish to split your site up into subwebs. Unfortunately, FrontPage's search bot will only index one Web, so you will not be able to provide visitors with a full site search. To get around this, try using the free search engine htdig which MindSpring provides with your Web Hosting account. See http://help.mindspring.com/webhelp/ for more details. For more information on using subwebs, refer to the official MicroSoft documentation you received with FrontPage.

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