Front Page Discussion Web

formating posts

[rpriddy]

I've set up a FrontPage discussion web and it works just fine. the only problem is posted entries have no formatting, just one big block of copy. Is there a way to put normal paragraph formatting at least or full html formatting preferably into the form?

[brotherhood of LAN]

Welcome to the forums rpriddy

It's been quite a while since I've used FP, I take it a Frontpage extension is used? I suspect that altering the output would involve altering some of the ASP that Frontpage generates for the extensions.

You may find Microsoft's pages on FP helpful, here is a page [support.microsoft.com] I found.

[rpriddy]

Thank you. I appreciate your help.

[cmendla]

OP - I was using frontpage for all of my sites. I had dabbled in the fp discussion tool a while back and found it to be quite limited.

If you are thinking about scaling up the site, keep in mind that FP support is ending. Sooner or later hosting companies will no longer offer FP extensions on their servers. The follow on, expression web has a lot of issues for me. What I have done on some of my sites was to integrate the site with a blogger or wordpress blog. Blogger has worked pretty well for me.

Also, about allowing some HTML - be very careful if you do that as it can be a route for things like buffer overflow attacks.

[rpriddy]

Cmendla, you didn't like Expression web? Because absent a fix for FP i was going to move to Expression web.

[cmendla]

rpriddy

For my needs, I found Expression web to have some problems.

1. I would need to buy a copy for each of my machines. That isn't that big of a deal but it is a factor..

2. From what I saw when I played with the trial version, it didn't handle the navigation as easily as frontpage. I forget the details but it had something to do with a need to add a third party open source app to Linux servers in order to mimic .net functionality. I didn't want to move to windows servers (My details are a bit fuzzy here)


I'm not sure if you can still get a trial of expression web but it is worth trying before you commit.

So far, I've found Joomla to be able to meet my needs. There is a learning curve. On the other hand, there are lots of open source extensions for joomla (and drupal) that really extend the functionality.

[rpriddy]

Thanks, I do have a trial of Expression Web, I'm certainly finding it more convoluted than FP. However, as they say, "easy to learn, hard to use, hard to learn easy to use." I don't know if that's true here, but it is harder to learn. I"ll look into Joomla.
Thanks,
Bob

[mack]

Moving towards a CMS such as Joomla might be a good idea, but by doing so you do loose quite a bit of control as opposed to creating the entire site by yourself.

I don't however think you should do anything with FP extensions. Their time has passed, and as another member pointed out its only a matter of time before web hosts stop supporting them.

Mack.