Re: The future of FrontPage / FrontPage Extensions

"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




"ChuckN" <Chuck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:eMDe02mTIHA.4768@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

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.

.

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