The FrontPage Explorer
The Microsoft FrontPage Explorer is a tool for creating, organizing, administering, and publishing FrontPage webs. Using the FrontPage Explorer, you create the structure or layout of your Web site, arrange its files and folders, import and export pages and files, test and repair hyperlinks, administer access privileges, and launch the FrontPage Editor to design and edit the contents of your Web pages. You also use the FrontPage Explorer to publish completed FrontPage webs on your computer, your organization’s intranet, or the World Wide Web.
A FrontPage web is a collection of HTML pages, images, documents, and other files and folders that make up a Web site. Authors can create, delete, open, edit, and close FrontPage webs using the FrontPage Explorer and FrontPage Editor on a client computer. FrontPage webs can be stored on a remote Web server, a Web server running on the same computer as the client program, or in the client computer’s file system.
A FrontPage web also contains a number of support files that provide added functionality with sophisticated features such as navigation bars, hyperlink recalculation and repair, full text index generation, consistent design elements from themes, automatic table of contents generation, and built-in forms handling.
Here are some of the key features of the FrontPage Explorer:
- You can quickly create professional-looking Web sites using the built-in web templates and wizards. For example, you can create a corporate presence on the World Wide Web with the Corporate Presence Wizard; launch a Customer Support site with the Customer Support Web template; host a discussion group with the Discussion Web Wizard; or publish a project management web with the Project Web template.
- If you have an existing Web site, you can easily convert it to a full-featured FrontPage web with the FrontPage Explorer’s Import Web Wizard. In a few steps, this wizard imports your pages, images, and files, while preserving the web’s structure as well as its hyperlinks.
- You can import files to your FrontPage web by specifying a folder in your file system to import its contents. You can also export files from your FrontPage web to your file system.
- You can display and maintain the files, folders, hyperlinks, and layout of a FrontPage web by selecting any of the FrontPage Explorer’s seven views. Each view gives you a different perspective of a FrontPage web, designed to assist you in maintaining FrontPage webs from their creation until their publication to a Web server.
- In the FrontPage Explorer, you can apply one or more shared borders — page regions that are reserved for content that you want to appear consistently throughout your pages. Shared borders usually contain navigation bars — hyperlinks to the other pages in the current FrontPage web. When you create a FrontPage web in the FrontPage Explorer’s Navigation view, FrontPage can create shared borders and navigation bars that are automatically updated whenever you add, move, or delete pages from the web’s structure.
- FrontPage includes a gallery of professionally designed graphics and color schemes — called themes — that can be applied to any FrontPage web. Themes enhance the appearance of list bullets, fonts, navigation bars, table borders, horizontal lines, and page backgrounds, and they lend an attractive and consistent appearance to any FrontPage web.
- You can double-click any HTML page in the FrontPage Explorer and it will open for editing in the FrontPage Editor. In the FrontPage Explorer, you can also associate other editors for other file types in your FrontPage web. When you double-click a file that has been associated with an editor, it will open in that editor.
- When your FrontPage web is ready to be published on the World Wide Web — or on your organization’s intranet — the FrontPage Explorer’s Publish command transfers the pages and files to the World Wide Web or a Web server while automatically verifying the addresses of pages and the paths to your files.
- If you use the FrontPage Explorer to rename or move a file in your FrontPage web, all hyperlink references to that file are automatically updated within the FrontPage web, including hyperlinks from Microsoft Office 97 documents. You can also verify and repair broken hyperlinks, including hyperlinks to external World Wide Web sites. In a multi-authoring environment, you can refresh hyperlinks to incorporate and view recent changes made to the FrontPage web by other authors.
- Using the Tasks view in the FrontPage Explorer, you can track and complete any unfinished FrontPage web tasks (such as spell-checking corrections) on all pages. Clicking a task can take you right to the page that needs work. Some tasks are generated automatically as you create and maintain a FrontPage web; you can add other tasks and assign them to other FrontPage authors.
- In multi-user environments, you can protect a FrontPage web from unauthorized access by requiring a logon username and password for browsing or authoring access.
