Catalog, FTP, & Front Page Extensions

[MeFromLondon]

We use Actinic Catalog for the bulk of our shop, with all the periphery pages (home, help, message forms, faqs, question/response forms) being created with Microsoft Front Page 2002. Both running on the same server/domain, hosted on Linux server (used to be Windows).

This has worked fine (or at least appeared to) for several years, but now we have conflicts between the two. Actinic works fine. The problem occurs when we upload our FP site; we get error messages about FP Extensions not being installed and time-outs. We reinstall the FP Extensions and we manage to get the Front Page uploaded, usually after several attempts and re-installs.

We’ve been told by the hosting company that Actinic or at least the FTP upload is corrupting the FP Extensions and we should consider dropping one or the other.

Are Actinic and Front Page incompatible?

Could it be due to running on Linux, and could this be cured by running on MS platform?

Any ideas?

Thanks
David

[pinbrook]

Personally I wouldn't touch FP with a barge pole, so my advise is going to be to use a different HTMLeditor.

There is a good opensource program available if cost is an issue

[jont]

Earlier versions of FP were a pig and earned it's dodgy reputation - 2002 onwards resolved a lot of issues and made it a very good program for non-professionals.

Make sure you are FTP'ing to the site and not using HTTP which is the default FP setting. You should not need the FP extensions (which really need an windows server) to FTP to the site and you should certainly NOT be using any of the propriatory FP / Microsoft code that needs the FP extensions.

I quite happily ran FP and Actinic v6 side by side for about 12 months without any issues once I started working and checking in HTML view. The generated code is quite clean in FP2002 but it is always worth checking before moving any Actinic specific code in HTML view that you are picking everything up - highlighting and moving in design view can sometimes orphan the codes.

If you are still having issues and are happy with FP you can always design in FP and use a standalone FTP program to upload the non-Actinic pages. If the pages are going into the /acatalog/ folder on the server you can add the pages into Advanced | Additional files so Actinic will FTP them to the site.

HTH