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Part I ✦ FrontPage Essentials
FrontPage server extensions are files that are installed not on your personal PC, but
on the server on which your Web site is hosted. Technically, you can have a Web
server on your own PC. However, your server software is more likely to be located
on a remote computer connected by an office intranet or the Internet. FrontPage
facilitates publishing your Web site from your own PC to a server, a process
described in detail in Chapter 3. Your server administrator provides you with a
URL, a user name, and a password. With that information, you set up a link to trans-
fer files from your local development computer to a Web server.
A Web server is the computer that hosts a Web site and the associated software.
The client is another way of talking about the computer and browser software
used by a visitor to view and interact with your Web site. Do all Web servers have
FrontPage extensions? No, but millions do. Office intranets created using the
Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system come with FrontPage server extensions
(although installing them is an option for the server administrator). In addition,
thousands of commercial Web site providers that offer FrontPage extensions are
competing for your Web-hosting dollars. Some of these providers will set you up
with a fully FrontPage-enabled Web site for less than $100 per year.
Developing a Web site in FrontPage probably doesn’t make sense unless you plan
to publish your site to a server with FrontPage extensions. FrontPage extensions
enable approximately 20 percent of the features in FrontPage, and they are among
the most powerful and valuable features. Of course, if you are publishing to
SharePoint Team Services, you don’t have to worry about the extensions.
The biggest drawback in this entire scenario is that until you publish your Web to a
server, you won’t be able to test features such as input forms, search boxes, and
other elements of your Web site.
Previous iterations of FrontPage and Office included a stripped-down version of a
FrontPage-enabled server called the Personal Web Server (PWS). Unfortunately, as of
FrontPage 2003, you can find no version of the Personal Web Server available for
Windows 95, 98, or Me that supports the most recent FrontPage extensions. In
short, if you are developing a site using any of these Microsoft operating systems,
you will need to publish your site to a remote server before you can test many of
the features you include in your Web site. Developers who have Windows 2000 on
their local computers can install a local server that does support FrontPage server
extensions.
Chapter 3 explores all this, including your options for publishing to FrontPage
servers.
The simplest and most universally available option for publishing Webs to
FrontPage-enabled servers is to contract with one of the many Web-hosting com-
panies that provide FrontPage extension server sites.
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