About managing the publishing process

There are different ways to manage the publishing process with Microsoft FrontPage:

Choose which files you want to publish

By default, files are marked for publishing, but you can change this setting. In the Publish Web dialog box, you can choose which files you don't want to publish. For instance, if a page is incomplete or not directly part of your web site, you can mark the file as Don't Publish . If the file is marked for publishing, it will have in front of it.

Important Certain files should not be published again after you first publish your web site. For example, you create a web site with a guestbook, and then publish the web site. If you later update your web site and publish all of your files, your guestbook will be replaced by a blank one, causing you to lose all of your information. Other examples include pages with a hit counter (Hit Counter component: A component in FrontPage that keeps track of the number of visitors to a World Wide Web site.) or discussion web sites.

You can also choose to publish only those files that have changed. Microsoft FrontPage will compare the files in the working web site on your local computer to the published files on the Web server. If FrontPage detects a newer version of a file on your local computer, the file will be published to the Web server (unless you specify otherwise).

Manage the files on the Web server

If your Internet service provider (ISP) or system administrator has given you a size limit on the Web server (Web server: A computer that hosts Web pages and responds to requests from browsers. Also known as an HTTP server, a Web server stores files whose URLs begin with http://.), file management is a necessity. Periodically deleting unused or old files (especially graphics) can keep the size of your web site down. Once you have published a web site, Microsoft FrontPage can synchronize the files on your local web site with the published files on the Web server, each time you publish.

Delete files or folders that have been published

When you publish your web site, FrontPage compares the current files on your local computer to those files on the Web server. So, to manage files on the Web server (for example, to get rid of old files or folders), you first delete or move the files or folders on the web site on your local computer. When you publish your web site again, FrontPage will prompt you about deleting the same files on the Web server.

If your Web server uses the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions (FrontPage Server Extensions: A set of programs and s that support authoring in FrontPage and extend the functionality of a Web server. ) or SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft, FrontPage can also match other actions on the Web server — such as moving or renaming files — the next time you publish your web site. FrontPage will update your link bars (link bar: A collection of graphic or text buttons representing hyperlinks to pages both within your web site and to external sites.), shared borders (shared borders: Page regions reserved for content that you want to appear consistently on all your web pages. Shared borders usually contain link bars — hyperlinks to the other pages in the current web site. ), and hyperlinks (hyperlink: Colored and underlined text or a graphic that you click to go to a file, a location in a file, an HTML page on the World Wide Web, or an HTML page on an intranet. Hyperlinks can also go to newsgroups and to Gopher, Telnet, and FTP sites.) on the Web server to match the actions you performed on the web site on your local computer.