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Microsoft FrontPage® 
pg. 12

• Installing the FrontPage® Server Extensions
• Obtaining the FrontPage® client Program
• Publishing Your FrontPage® Web
• Managing Subwebs (Child Webs)
• FrontPage® Limitations

This chapter provides basic information about Microsoft® FrontPage®  and is not intended to replace the documentation provided by Microsoft Corporation. For in-depth coverage of the FrontPage system, including links to multimedia demos and tutorials, please consult Microsoft’s FrontPage site at the following URL:
Microsoft Office - FrontPage Home
Microsoft FrontPage is a software package that allows you to easily create and maintain Web sites on your virtual server, without requiring the use of HTML or FTP.
The FrontPage system consists of the following two parts:

• The FrontPage Client program runs on your personal computer and must be purchased from a software dealer.
• The FrontPage Server Extensions, which make it possible for your FrontPage client to communicate with your Web server.

Installing the FrontPage® Server Extensions
Before you can use Microsoft® FrontPage®  with your virtual server, you must first install the FrontPage Server Extensions. These extensions simplify the process of creating and maintaining your Web pages by allowing you to connect directly to your virtual server through the FrontPage client program. They also enable you to use special FrontPage Bots, which can greatly enhance the functionality of your Web pages.
To install the FrontPage Server Extensions, login to your virtual server and type the following at the command prompt:
vinstall frontpage Enter
You will be asked some simple questions about how you would like these extensions to be set up. One of the most important questions that you will be asked is what “Web” you would like to install the extensions under. There are a couple of ways you can respond. You should always install the extensions on your Root Web first. Doing so will allow you to access and maintain all of the files in your ~/www/htdocs directory from your FrontPage Explorer.
If you have any virtual hosts on your virtual server, you can optionally install the extensions on each of these virtual hosts separately. This means that the files and directories that make up the virtual host’s Web site would not show up when you open your main Root Web from the FrontPage explorer. This also means that your customers can open their own Web with a separate username and password while the rest of the files on your virtual server remain inaccessible to them. This is a great feature that allows you to let your clients maintain their own Web sites without you needing to grant them access to your own files. It also allows your clients to connect to their own domain name through the FrontPage Explorer, rather than use yours.
After you have told the installation program which Web you wish to install, and provided a username and password for the Web, the installation process will begin. It may take several minutes to complete, so please be patient. If you receive no error messages, your FrontPage extensions were installed successfully.

Obtaining the FrontPage®  Client Program
Before you can use Microsoft® FrontPage® , you must purchase the FrontPage client program from a software distributor and install it on your computer. If you have difficulty installing the FrontPage client program, please contact Microsoft’s Technical Support page at http://www.microsoft.com/Support/ for assistance.

Publishing Your FrontPage® Web
Once you’ve created a local FrontPage® Web, it’s very easy to publish it to your Web server. First, make sure that you are connected to the Internet. Then, follow the steps below to publish your FrontPage Web:

1. Open your local Web with FrontPage® Explorer.
2. From the File menu, select Publish FrontPage Web.

A dialog box appears, asking for the location to publish the Web to.

1. In the dialog box, type your complete domain name and click OK.
2. Enter the username and password for the FrontPage Web.

After you enter the username and password, FrontPage begins to publish the entire Web as your main Web site, or Root Web. Depending on the speed of your Internet connection and the size of your Web site’s content, this process may take a significant amount of time.

Publishing to a Subdirectory
If you want to publish a FrontPage Web to a specific subdirectory of your Web server’s www/htdocs directory, follow the same steps as above, with the following exception: when you type your domain name as the location, add a slash (/) and then the name of the directory.
For example, assume your domain name is “domain.com” and you want the Web you are about to publish to be accessible through the URL http://www.domain.com/stuff. To do so, you would need to enter “domain.com/stuff” as the location to publish the Web to.

Managing Subwebs (Child Webs)
When you make changes to the content of your FrontPage® Web, every document within that Web gets updated. As a result, you may start to experience performance issues as your Web site grows in size.
To increase performance, it is recommended that you break up larger Webs into smaller subwebs, or "child Webs." FrontPage has the ability to break up large Webs into many smaller subwebs, which can greatly improve your Web server's performance.
Subwebs offer many advantages and uses, aside from increased performance. For example, you may want to set up different subwebs for products, sales, and product support so that you can update each individually, especially if each of these Webs contains a large amount of data. Use subwebs to organize your site logically, based on the needs of your organization.

Creating a Subweb
Each of your virtual hosts is given a separate Web in which subwebs can be created. A subweb initially inherits certain settings, such as themes and permissions, from its parent web.
To create a subweb, you must follow the steps below:
From FrontPage® Explorer, choose
File, New, FrontPage Web.
You are prompted for the type of Web to create.
Select Empty Web.
When prompted for the title of the Web, change it so that the location is your domain name, followed by a slash (/), followed by the name of the directory where the files reside.
After the above steps are completed, FrontPage creates the new Web.
You can also create a subweb by converting a folder to a Web, or by importing a Web into a folder and then converting the folder into a web.

FrontPage® Limitations
We have discovered a few limitations to the Microsoft® FrontPage®  Server Extensions, which are listed below for your convenience:

• The FrontPage Search Bot does not function properly with our flavor of UNIX. For this reason, be sure NOT to install the FrontPage Search Bot when using discussion groups on your virtual server.
• Confirmation pages of Form Result Bots must reside in the same Web as the form that is processing the results.
• The Include Bot can only be used to include pages within the same Web.
• Some FrontPage Wizard Webs do not publish correctly to the server.
• Some Web Bot components such as forms and shared borders do not function through SSL connections at this time. This is a bug in FrontPage and has nothing to do with our servers.

If you encounter a problem that is not documented here, please email our Technical Support team so that we can make other customers aware of the issue.