Important Things To Know (summary):

If you choose to use Frontpage, the only way to upload your web site(s) is with frontpage. you CAN NOT FTP into your Frontpage Directory. You can use FTP & TELNET to enter other areas of your site outside the Frontpage Directory structure

Everytime you create a "New Web" on our server, we will have to restart your web deamon. We have now updated our Web Configuration to automatically reboot every 15 minutes if you have "Created A New Web".

Frontpage is a good product, however its transfer protocol is temperamental. Therefore it is a good idea to have each of your directories created as their own web, and then "publish" it to your web.

When you "Publish" or "Copy" your first web to our server you can put a "/" or leave it blank (depending on what version you're using) in the name of the web the destination web, and this should place your web in the "root web" directory. (See Fig. 1)

If the "Web Publishing Wizard" appears when you hit the publish command, you are going in the wrong direction. Uninstall the Web Publishing Wizard, it is for sites that do not have the Frontpage Server Extensions installed.

One of our clients has told us that if you check ON the "Connect Using SSL" box you may have an easier time uploading your site. Give it a try if you think it will help your transfer. Thanks Bruce.

Last thing to remember is "You Must Be Online To Publish You Web".

(Sorry, all you fine non-virtual customers - FrontPage will onlywork with fully qualified domain names. Gives you incentive to upgrade, huh?!?)

The Specifics (Long version)

If you are an existing customer that DID NOT order Frontpage upon your initial signup, there is a small amount of work to do on your part, also. Because of the manner in which FrontPage operates, it has to own the directories that it will administer. So in order to use FrontPage in your Webspace, you need to:

Create a directory within your home directory named frontpage. No more or less letters and exactly as it is here, so if your home directory is /web/guide/myhome, then you would execute the command mkdir frontpage from this directory.

Move all of the HTML documents you wish to use with FrontPage to this directory. You don't need to worry about moving your CGI, your .domains/.mreply.rc files, or anything you want to be able to administer in the usual manner through telnet/FTP. (I say move, but it would probably be best to copy everything first so that you retain a copy in your regular directory and your pages are still active until we make the change.)

Fax us a letter, (803.842.9575), that you wish to have FrontPage activated for your account. This should be done by the same person who set up the original contract, since we will use the username and password from the original contract to setup FrontPage.

We will then activate FrontPage. FrontPage will take ownership of the files within the frontpage directory and the frontpage directory will then become your DocumentRoot directory for your web pages. No need be adjust your paths in most cases - we will create a directive called a ScriptAlias that will make your cgibin directory act as though it is still in the same place. So references to http://www.yourdomain.com/cgibin/whatever.cgi should still work.

Keep in mind that you won't be able to put files into the frontpage directory except via FrontPage. It is an excellent system (we've enjoyed playing with it already!), but not perfect. I'm sure that you will enjoy most aspects of it, but the Unix environment is not a seamless environment. Standard links will change immediately when you save your pages, but if you add some functionality such as one their forms, then that change will not be available until the next time we KILLHUP the web process; by this I mean that on a regular basis (probably every 1 - 2 hours), we will have the web process reread its configuration files. At this time, changes that required an additional line in the configuration file will be read.