Note to Web Designers:

Frontpage is an ancient tool, Today, Websites are built with Joomla, WordPress or some similar "Content Management System"! Therefore this article is mostly obsolete.

We, along with many other responsible internet servers, will not be supporting Frontpage extensions out of principal. Below is some information about support for FrontPage extensions which may be of interest to you.

Q: Do you support Microsoft FrontPage server extensions?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: For numerous reasons. Including, but not limited to:

&nbsp&nbsp * FrontPage extensions require our web server to run as root on our system, which is against our security policy since it opens up potential security holes and endangers stability of the system in general.

&nbsp&nbsp * There are several reported security bugs which endanger stability of the system.

&nbsp&nbsp * Microsoft will not release the source code. We have access to the source of every other piece of software on our system -- we insist on it. Installing these would throw security and configurability out the window.

&nbsp&nbsp * FrontPage server extensions would interfere with the smooth working cycle of our HTTP server, since it's somewhat picky about how you can restart your server.

&nbsp&nbsp * Users of the Apache web server (that's what we run here) have reported incompatibility of the Frontpage server extensions with several types of existing CGI programs, effectively blocking the latter from execution.

&nbsp&nbsp * Most functionality is already covered by several custom scripts that are available on the web, including counter and search programs. More info (and more scripts) are available at http://www.ualberta.ca/WebSupport/Tools.html, (for example).

&nbsp&nbsp * Microsoft admits that the shipping version of FrontPage extensions is buggy. Many bugs have been reported, some are serious security issues. More will be found. For the details, look here: &nbsp&nbsp www.useractive.com/fprisk.html &nbsp&nbsp www.itma.lu/howto/apache/ &nbsp&nbsp www.insecure.org/sploits/Microsoft.frontpage.insecurities.htm l

Q: Does this mean that you can't use FrontPage to design you web page?

A: No, not at all. Go right ahead and build your page with Front Page, however, you will not be able to use any of FP's "bot" features (ie. hit counters, etc). You may have troubles with FP's publishing ability, but you can always just FTP the files instead.

I suggest, if you have the time, to learn PHP, which is the standard script language for web pages. It can give you many more options, for example shopping carts.