[General] Frontpage Extensions

We have had quite a few issues raised concerning Frontpage and Frontpage Extensions. Frontpage and Frontpage Extensions are a Microsoft developed product and system for publishing a website. The Extensions act a little bit like FTP, but it is different from FTP in that it is a proprietary communication method developed by Microsoft. The only product that understands Frontpage Extensions is Frontpage or Frontpage-based products. Likewise, Frontpage and Frontpage-based products require Frontpage Extensions in order to publish a website. As you can see, this requires a bit of involvement with Microsoft and their proprietary standards in order to use these products. This differs from FTP in that FTP is a recognized as an industry standard. For example, the FTP command PUT, used to upload files to a server, cannot change the way it performs a task because there are so many FTP servers and FTP clients available. If this were changed, none of the FTP servers and FTP clients would be able to communicate with one another.

Microsoft stopped development of Frontpage Extensions and Frontpage products late last year. There are no updates to the Frontpage Extensions that are on the server. Microsoft has shifted their attention to another product called Sharepoint Services. Sharepoint Servics act a lot like Frontpage Extensions, the downside is that Microsoft is not distributing the source for this project and therefor Sharepoint Services cannot be ported over to other operating systems. All of our servers are Linux based web servers and not Microsoft based. This means that Sharepoint Services will not work on our servers. Newer products released by Microsoft and some updates provided by Microsoft force Frontpage and Frontpage-based softwares from Microsoft to only work with Sharepoint Services. If you are having trouble publishing with Frontpage, this is probably why.

What can be done regarding this? I would recommend that you move away from Frontpage and to another product. Adobe’s Dreamweaver is a popular web publishing tool and it uses FTP to publish your website. Using something like Dreamweaver which uses FTP to publish your website makes your website that much more portable. If you decide to move your website somewhere else, chances are very good that it will have a FTP service available able to publish your website. This releases you away from using Microsoft’s proprietary standards. I know switching from Frontpage to Dreamweaver (or some other WYSIWYG HTML editor) is not going to be an easy task. I’m not saying it won’t be and I’m not saying that its a change that you can make overnight. I’m just saying that if you are publishing your website and making changes often or into web design, then I would recommend moving away from the Frontpage and Frontpage based products (such as Expression Web).

Additional information regarding this can be found on Microsoft‘s website. You may be able to use a product like Expression Web to design a webpage, but you won’t be able to publish with it.

I do apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused. But please understand, it was not our decision to remove and stop developing Frontpage Extensions. This was a decision made by Microsoft, to shift their attention to Sharepoint Services. I know that this is affecting a lot of users, but there’s just really nothing we can do in regards to this because we don’t control Frontpage Extensions or Sharepoint Services.