Specifically - "what options do you use"

I have a good number of customers that use FPE.

THE GOODISH:
The publish part is useful (for them at least)
The site content map automation facility
Automated navigation bars
Forms to email or dbase (this one is easily got round with CGI of course)
The Search facility

THE BADISH:
Bow to others better knowledge on the security issues.
The use of NOBODY as the user - big problems when trying to incorporate things like phpBB2 or some CMS stuff.

There are zillions of bods out there that want to use front page and the extensions and although my customers are moving away from FPE I am certain others will want them as the hosting side of my buiness expands.

Coming from a MSoft background and still supporting intranets with Sharepoint Services (when will the Open Source community come up with a mySQL based challenge to this?) I have and do use front page to create and manage sites very quickly for clients. The tool is not half as bad as it used to be (it even leaves your code intact these days ;-) )

Plesk and I think cPanel incorporate FPE so I think it will probably be a competitive requirement for Vmin anyway?

If anyone has any good suggestions for replacing "the good" above with quick and easy not to technical solutions I would love to try them out on exsisting clients to see how well they perform.

I have had issues with MS products at times and I'm keen to try and move more into Open Source solutions and new invovations on the back of it (Hence going for Virtualmin Pro recently) The problem is the fact that joe public uses no end of their products which forces the commercial hand of the rest of us.

Just a thought in follow up:

MS aren't releasing any more FPE's and I suspect support for FPE on apache will be very low on the agenda from now on.

They are drving everyone to run Sharepoint services which although quite good it does mean you have to use a Windows platfrom and ideally SQL server.

Reiterating my comments above: Is there any way a list of suitable FPE replacements could be incorporated by... easily installing CGI's for form handling, maybe chillisoft! for ASP type stuff, something for site search without adverts and auto generated site mapping etc all common requirements but a bit of a mine field for those from a windows background who want to convert (insert sheepish grin here!)

I reckon a lot of FP users would convert if they could ID some easy to use alternatives for what they have been used to using.

Particularly if they became aware of the limited future life span of FPE's

I think on balance it may not be worth Joe "wasting" time on what is in fact obsolete and shelved technolgy?

I use FP extensions to handle my form data. Of course, since MS end-of-lifed the extensions, the Frontpage editor I bought from them is basically going to be worthless in a few years.

CPanel still supports those extensions, and they claim that they will continue to do so in the forseeable future. But their prices are terrible.

I'm going to learn more about CGI programming when I can. First things first -> set up some servers that handle what I need.

Hey Jack,
I see this post is from 2005. Has any support been done to allow Frontpage Extension in webmin. I too still have customers wanting to use it with Web Expressions (Fronpage K7)?

Jim

I see this post is from 2005. Has any support been done to allow Frontpage Extension in webmin. I too still have customers wanting to use it with Web Expressions (Fronpage K7)?

There is nothing to be done about FPE. Support for them ended nearly two years ago, and Microsoft revoked the license to distribute them--no one can legally distribute FrontPage Extensions.

To be emphatic: We cannot legally support FrontPage Extensions. Microsoft has end-of-lifed the FrontPage Extensions in their own products at around the same time. It is a dead protocol.

If you need a specific feature, let us know what it is, and we'll try to provide some easy to follow documentation for re-creating the functionality without FPE. But FPE will never be supported.

If you really must have FP extensions it's worth the price to get a cpanel or plesk license and put those customers on another server. I have access to a few cpanel servers as well as my virtualmin server, and that's where I put users who want to do their own html sites, or run FTP servers because it's just so much easier and safer. However it is very expensive unless you have 50+ clients. One area where cpanel is stronger is in handling massive amounts of email accounts.

With that said, once you show someone how simple it is to create a nice site with Wordpress, they might not be so hot on FP anymore.

I much prefer virtualmin for my own use and developing more PHP intensive sites, because it's so much easier to install packages and change conf files without breaking the server. Webmin and Virtualmin far out-shine cpanel for general webserver management and development, but cpanel is worth it if you are just running a large scale hosting operation. Plesk I don't like much at all -- it's pretty, but it's dumb.

I wonder how they are getting around the fact that they are violating Microsoft copyright by continuing to distribute FP extensions?

The cpanel and plesk developers are violating the Microsoft license agreement that goes with the FPE.

Anyone that is using them still under the linux/unix OS is liable to be sued once MS finds out. This includes the CPanel and Plesk people.

Using FPE on your sites is risky and not worth the legal fees MS will demand from you.