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help! frontpage replacement needed

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mrgreenjeans

Member
Joined
May 3, 2003
Location
Cleveland, GA
hey. I just volunteered to take over a local organization's website and in the process learned of the lack of continuing support for Frontpage and was wondering what is recommended for replacement web editing software. I'd like something that could format the existing files and save me from having to rebuild from scratch. I know the code breaks upon reload and server changes, which is exactly what is fixing to happen. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
And as in all volunteer situations, money IS an object...
 
i agree with using a CMS. makes it very easy for a client to go in and edit information themselves. Wordpress is great for Blogs out of the box and can be extended to do more, while Joomla and Drupal are great for larger sites and can function as simple blogs.

http://wordpress.org/
http://drupal.org/
http://www.joomla.org/

edit: p.s. these all have Graphical Editors built into them, and if you don't like the default you can change them with plugins
 
I have been playing with dreamweaver for a long time..
And its quite good, i mean, its COOL!!..
Easy to use, automatic ftp upload.
Also, BEAUTIFUL AND HANDY templates

(that saved my ***) sorry, bad word.
 
I tend to agree with the CMS suggestions.

Dreamweaver is a good suggestion, but by no means is it even close to free/cheap. I would suggest Visual Web Developer, Microsoft's free web oriented version of Visual Studio. Has decent WYSIWYG support and is based on what is probably the best IDE available.

In addition to the earlier suggestions, if they are a Microsoft centric organization ( running windows server, I highly suggest Windows Sharepoint Services, which are free and if you go that route, you can get Sharepoint Designer free, which is actually what Frontpage became.
 
I hate content management systems in general, as a system admin for a hosting company they are a nightmare for me.
The biggest issue with content management systems is that they permit lazy people to do complex web designs. Many of these people do not understand the code and wose still many more do not update or patch them as such there are many content management systems running on sites which have widely known exploits.

If you don't patch these systems your site will eventually be owned imho

WYSIWYG Editors in general produce lazy and bloated code which does not look good in all browsers, I think when you are undertaking coding of any kind you should learn how to do the basics at least.

Bluefish is reasonable although I personally like Vim as an editor

Get as far away as you can from Frontpage, its no longer supported by Microsoft or anyone else with sense - it has known issues.
 
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Sage advice. :thup:

I'd say in this situation, your choice is custom code new pages as they need them, or give them a CMS so they can do things themselves, and just ensure you keep it security patched.

If the site is regularly updated I'd prefer to keep up with security patches, and not be involved in the day to day page maintenance or updates though, and hope the users don't wreak too much havic - they'd need to be locked down as much as possible. But limiting their abilities from the start to only what they need can help.

I'd say it also depends on what the site is going to be doing. If it's low on content, and doesn't need to be updated often, I'd say a flat site with basic html pages would be ideal. But I'm probably bias if you take imog.us into consideration. ;)
 
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