The End Is Near!
Today, the worlds largest web hosting company, 1and1, unceremoniously announced to its hundreds of thousands of customers that the end was near! The end of Microsoft FrontPage Extensions!
Thanks to Microsoft’s abandonment of FrontPage last year, the plug is now being pulled on one of the largest groups of website owners in the world. Unfortunately, when Microsoft introduced it’s new generation of Web Applications, they ignored the Server extensions that made Microsoft such an attractive solution to web design. I one single step, vast numbers of small businesses, and individuals, who have their own websites are being turned out into the cold.
For those in this situation, there is no choice but to immediately design out every feature of their website that depends upon the FPSE server extensions. What Microsoft doesn’t realize, is the very bad taste this is going to leave in the mouths of tens of thousands of consumers, at the very least.
So, the final word is just this: get busy! You have 5 days to save your website!
I you are aware of solutions; php forms handlers, server side include solutions, etc., please post a response for our readers!!!
I just got off the phone w/ 1and1….they told me to re-read my email letter carefully, and note that the only functionality that would not be working after the specified date is the stuff listed at the bottom of the letter. (which does includes forms).
They said, in the States , shared borders and includes (SSI) will continue to work. Not sure outside of here.
I was in a huge panic as we have about 25 FP sites and all navigation plus more is in Includes and or shared borders. Monday is a holiday in the states and they gave me 4 days which included a weekend and a holiday…bummer…no way to treat customers, they could have given us a months notice.
Meanwhile I have ordered Dreamweaver…I dont want MS to leave me in a lurch again.
L. W.
An Update: 1and1 sent out a new email with the date changed to February 26th for the end of FrontPage Extensions. So you have a little more breathing room! I have 712 websites to convert myself!
Keep in mind that there are many features provided by FPSE: FP bot driven includes, navigation controls, forms, dynamic content, styles (not CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which is what you really should be using anyway), security, and more.
Here are some things to be concerned about: portions of your site that depend on separate security may become open to browsing; navigation using FP’s navigation tools will show as blank or error - cutting off access to your pages; includes will become a simple text string; forms will show an error message and stop working; sites that allowed or relied on MS Office publishing of spreadsheets or Word documents as part of the site will have to have these uploaded via FTP since the Office feature will no longer work; and in general all the website management tools built into FrontPage or even ExpressionWeb - you will have to revert to straight dumb F-T-P.
Personally, I am amazed MS was willing to throw away the market share they had, AND why no one else has introduced there own replacement for the FPSE. There has to be smart open-source programmers out there that could reproduce it, who would want the instant market share that would come with replacing Microsoft in the server space!