Front and Center: The Power of Open Sites and Dead Extensions

I've been a big fan of FrontPage since the very beginning. That should be of no surprise to anyone reading this book.

One of the things I always loved about the product was the ability to go in live to a server and update certain elements directly on the site (and yes, those previous warnings about doing so come from personal experience). Obviously, solid development work needs to be done on a development machine and perfected before published, but, on occasion, there are reasons to edit on the server side.

Being able to enter the URL in to FrontPage, open the site live, and make a small change here and there has saved me countless hours. If you've used FrontPage for any amount of time, I'm sure that you feel the same way.

But, this approach has always required FrontPage Extensions. Now that FrontPage Extensions are, if not dead, well on their way out, the options discussed in this chapter make things even more powerful than before.

Although you aren't updating and modifying a page directly as is possible with a server with FrontPage Extensions, the other methods described in this chapter provide a quick and easy means to edit and modify content at a remote site. No one should be worried about making sure that they have a copy of an entire site at their disposal in order to get any work done.

The true power of FrontPage is how it speeds up the Web design process. Embrace every aspect of the product that lets you do just that.