End of Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions Availability – Microsoft announced that FrontPage 2003 would be the last version of FrontPage to be released. FrontPage has reached its “End of Life” with Microsoft. Microsoft also announced that the Unix FrontPage server extensions have also reached their EOL date.
Some features used in FrontPage web sites are based on FrontPage Server Extensions released by Microsoft. Things like form processing, themes, hit counters and even website publishing. These features are collectively known as the FrontPage web-bots.
Because of the EOL decision by Microsoft, developers since the announcement are not concerned about compatibility issues with the extensions. As technology grows, the continued support and installation of the extensions limits us from adding new features and continuing to update some of the server side software because of compatibility issues such as Apache 2. The developer of the control panel system we utilize has also announced that FrontPage server extensions are no longer supported. Additionally, the opportunity for a security problem with these extensions running with other updated software could leave our servers vulnerable.
Options
If you are currently utilizing Microsoft FrontPage to develop and publish your web site, you have several options . . . each with its own advantages and disadvantages
Continue to Use FrontPage
You can continue to utilize FrontPage to develop and publish your web site. The lack of server extensions only limits some of the advanced features of the product. We suggest using the Find feature within FrontPage and search the source code of all you pages for “webbot” without the quotation marks. This will highlight each instance where the code relies on the server extensions. You can see a list of features that rely on extensions in this Microsoft Article. Publishing can be done with the built in FTP application within FrontPage.
Tips to Continue to Use FrontPage
If you would like to continue to utilize the FrontPage program you certainly can as only some of the features will not work without the FrontPage Server Extensions installed. Here is a list of some of the most common ones and suggested work arounds:
Publishing
Rather than utilize the FrontPage Server Extensions to publish your web site via http, you’ll need to utilize the built-in FTP client within FrontPage. If you are not already building your pages with FrontPage on your local PC and then uploading them, you’ll need to start as direct to server publishing will not be supported. After you click Publish, change the Remote Server type to FTP and fill-in the information indicated:
Remote Web Site Location = Host Name indicated under FTP User in your control panel
FTP Directory = the domain name you want to publish
You will be prompted for:
Username = FTP Login shown as FTP User in your control panel
Password = Your Password (FTP may be different then control panel password)
If you need a good (and free) FTP client Filezilla is easy to learn and use.
Online Form Submissions
This is pretty straight forward. You just need to send the fields collected to a script rather than have FrontPage do it. There are many similar free products out there. Both of these scripts will collect all the fields on your form and send it to an email address of your choosing. Confirmation pages and emails are also available.
Statistics and Reports
We provide Webalizer in your hosting control panel. It’s a much better statistics program for your site than FrontPage reports ever was.
Subwebs and Permissions
You can utilize FTP-Sub accounts available in your hosting control panel if you are using subwebs with different publishing authorities for different parts of the site. This allows restriction of the FTP login account to a certain folder on your site for that particular user.