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Trick the Import Web Wizard

FrontPage's Import Web Wizard provides a step-by-step process to import an existing site into a new FrontPage Web. Unfortunately, the Wizard has an annoying quirk that could waste a lot of development time.

When importing a site, the Wizard automatically changes the filenames of the default pages in the main directory and subdirectories to conform to the FrontPage Personal Web Server's default, which is index.htm. For example, if the external site's server requires each default page in a directory to be named index.html, the Wizard changes the name of each default page to index.htm when you import it to your FrontPage Personal Web Server.

If you were importing a large site with lots of subdirectories, you'd have to go through and rename each file by hand. To get around that, simply change the Personal Web Server's default page-name setting.

In Windows Explorer, navigate to your system's FrontPage Webs/Server/Conf folder and open the srm.cnf file with a text editor. Find the section of the file that reads:

Remove the pound sign and space from the beginning of the last line and change the filename to whatever default name your host's server requires. (In our example, the last line would read DirectoryIndex index.html.)

The next time you start up FrontPage and use the Import Web Wizard, it will leave your default page names as is.

Take your Web with you

Web builders are not just working from their offices anymore. They're taking their work with them on the road and offline. If you occasionally need to take your Web work where an Internet connection won't go, FrontPage's Publish feature is just what you need. It creates a disk-based copy of your site (in a folder on your local hard drive) so you can work on it while you're on the backroads of Bora Bora.

To publish your site to your local file system, click the Publish button in FrontPage Explorer. In the Publish dialog box, click the More Webs button. Then type in the full path where you want your site located. If the folder doesn't exist, FrontPage will offer to create it.

When you're finished, you can simply copy the new folder to a disk and take it with you wherever you go.

Another benefit is that you can now post the site to any Web server, no matter what type it is. Note, however, that your FrontPage Components will not work unless the server has the FrontPage Server Extensions installed. These Components include the Search form, Form Results (the default form-handler), the Discussion form, and the Registration form. 

Author: From Web Building