Ken Marcus - Precision Web Hosting, Inc. wrote:
>
> My customers are upgrading to Microsoft Expression Web which needs the
> FrontPage extensions; and my existing customers that still use FrontPage
> 2003 etc.
FWIW, I flipped through a book on Expression Web last night and it said
Expression Web can use either FrontPage extensions or WebDAV (in
addition to publishing via FTP or to disk). There were absolutely no
details about publishing via WebDAV.
Since Microsoft EOL'd the FrontPage extensions for Linux in mid-2006 and
it's getting legally questionable to deploy new servers with the
FrontPage extensions (http://www.rtr.com/fpsupport/whatsnew.htm), I
believe we should be looking at adding WebDAV support to BQ.
This would give us an option for supporting Expression Web users.
Existing customers with FrontPage could be encouraged to upgrade to
Expression Web (or a less expensive alternative), or move to publishing
via FTP, or hosted on an old server for which FrontPage extensions are
still available.
I happened to look at turning on WebDAV on a Plesk server yesterday. It
doesn't look too bad. You make sure mod_dav is enabled in Apache, and
then hook it up to an authentication database for the directory the
publisher is going to want to push files to. I only took a cursory
look, so I'm not sure what authentication schemes are supported. I also
recall reading that mod_dav and the FrontPage extensions don't play well
together.
BTW, Plesk doesn't have a nice WebDAV control panel applet. They also
stopped shipping FrontPage extensions in Plesk 8.x, I believe. If BQ
automatically turned on WebDAV for the main FTP user and the personal
web sites, that might give us a nice advantage over Plesk. (If I had
any spare time, I'd put in some work on this.)
Regards,
Richard Siddall