Web Page and Site Maintenance Tools
CS6204, Spring 1997
Microsoft Front Page
- FrontPage Editor
for Web page creation
- FrontPage Explorer
for site administration
- FrontPage Personal Web Server to locally test forms and
links on your Web site
Front Page Editor

Pros:
- Has notion of a "Web of pages" that you store in a directory
on your local machine; Web can be copied to or from a server
- WYSIWYG table editing.
- Allows creation of
- You can add attributes to any HTML tag
- Comes with page templates; allows creation of custom templates
for your page style
- 'Bots' [robots]: FrontPage server extensions (available free for most
servers) to
- Insert date/time page was last edited
- Add annotation that can only be seen from editor (not browser)
- Echo data entered into a form field (i.e., for confirmation page)
- Add non-standard HTML to a page
- Include content of another page (very useful to include navigation
bar, etc. on all pages in your Web site)
- Insert "scheduled image" or "scheduled include [text]":
Image or text is not displayed after expiration time
- Insert a "search bot": a form that invokes a search engine
of all pages in your Web.
- Replace "substitution bot" with value of a Web or page configuration
variable.
- Inserts a table-of-contents list that is updated whenever Web's contents
changes.
- Ability to put form field input into a variety of text file formats
(e.g., for a database) so that you can do simple form processing without
writing CGI scripts.
- Distinguishes file name from URL.
- Auto update of links in documents:
- If you modify URL of one page in your Web, links and Bots in all other
pages in your Web are updated to use that URL.
- If you rename or move any file, links and Bots from other pages in
your Web are updated.
- Auto verification of links - both local to pages within your Web and
(optionally) remote to rest of Internet.
- Allows insertion of another HTML, text, or RTF document into document
you're editing.
- Back and Forward buttons let you cycle through history of pages you've
edited.
- Link to a "todo" list of tasks you must do to your Web site.
- Allows insertion of special HTML characters from a graphical window.
- Spell checker
Cons:
- Must have front page extensions installed on server to use bots, and
to copy Web of pages to/from Web server. However free extensions are available
for most Web servers.
- No font family support
- Unusual naming convention used: calls an anchor a "bookmark"
Front Page Explorer
Pros:
- You can open a Web, either locally or from a remote server:

- Graphical "link view" of your Web site, as shown in picture
above.

- Various commands in above view to expose, hide pages and link types.
- You can also change link view to a summary view:

- Automatically launches a local Web server when started, so you can
use whatever browser you wish to review your pages as you develop them.
- Can display administrative iinformation about Web:
- Creation, mod date
- Who created Web
- Web size (very useful when copying a Web to your laptop over a modem!)
- Allows rudimentary administration of created Webs:
- userid and password protection, so multiple developers don't interfere
with each other, or to restrict who can modify a certain Web
- inerface for password changing
- can apply .htaccess type access restrictions to a local Web (e.g.,
access allowed only to certan IP addresses)
Cons:
- Remote Webs can only be accessed if they have the free FrontPage server
extensions.
Last modified on 14 March 1997 by abrams@vt.edu.
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