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FrontPage Extensions Discontinued

FrontPage extensions are being removed from web hosting companies across the internet. The most recent I’ve heard is 1and1. Microsoft ended it’s support for FrontPage in 2006 and most hosts are slowly removing them. It’s impossible for a web hosting company to support a product that a vendor no longer supports. This is a good thing. FrontPage extensions are difficult to support, and, more importantly, they have posed a security risk on servers for years.

If you’re a hardcore FrontPage user, you may not think of this as being a good thing. And as a FrontPage user, you should be changing your sites so you don’t have to be dependent on FrontPage – mainly the components it uses. If your hosting company sends you an email informing you that it is no longer going to support FPSE, you will need to get busy and fix your sites to work without them – or hire someone to do so. You can still use Frontpage to develop your sites, but you won’t be able to use any of the Frontpage components.

First, take a look at your website (or websites) and ask yourself some questions.

What kind of webbots are you using?

  • Nested subwebs – Change to folders
  • Frontpage Forms – You’ll need to change over to either a Perl or PHP handled form. There are a multitude of free scripts out there for forms.
  • FrontPage Search – There are free search scripts around, or you can check out Frontlook which offers a search using either ASP (For Windows) or PHP.
  • Hit Counters – If you insist on a hit counter, most hosts provide this as part of their package. Otherwise, lose the counter.
  • Discussion Web – Upgrade to a forum like PHPbb or Vbulletin.
  • Category Component – You’ll need to relink this, just as you would a normal link.
  • Shared Borders – Switch over to CSS for this
  • Guestbooks – there are plenty of free scripts for guestbooks. You might even want to consider a blog for this.
  • Table of Contents – can be changed over to straight HTML
  • Frontpage Includes – If you’re using the includes component, you will need to switch over to PHP includes or SSI (server side includes)

These components don’t need Frontpage extensions to work, so you should not have to do anything:

  • Themes
  • HTML Markup
  • Substitution Component
  • Page Banner
  • Custom Link Bar
  • Back/Next Link Bar

Publishing

The Frontpage publishing feature will no longer work, so you will need to use an FTP program and FTP your files to your website, or use the FTP feature of FrontPage. Contact your host for your ftp settings.

Subwebs

The thing to remember about subwebs is that a subweb is nothing but a folder. For some reason people are scared by subwebs. You will need to convert your subwebs to a folder. You do this while you are connected live to your site in FrontPage, right click on the subweb, and select Convert to Folder, and voila! You have a folder.

Expression Web

ExpressionWeb is the new editor by Microsoft that is replacing Frontpage. I have not tried it. If you are going to buy Frontpage, you might want to consider it.

http://www.microsoft.com/Expression/products/retail.aspx?key=web

You can try a free trial:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/download.aspx?key=web

If you own any of these programs:

  • Microsoft FrontPage (any version)
  • Microsoft Office (any version)
  • Adobe/Macromedia Creative Suite (any version)
  • Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver (any version)
  • Adobe/Macromedia Flash or Director (any version)
  • Adobe GoLive (any version)

you can get it for $99. (not sure if it’s the upgrade or not).