Christopher J. Hradil

Permalinks & MS Frontpage –

There have been a number of threads on this issue, and I’ve updated the documentation in the codex to reflect the following information.

Normally, on a Unix server with the Microsoft Frontpage Server extensions installed wordpress works just fine and you are able to
edit and publish pages – UNTIL – you make a change to the permalinks (for example to the date based kind that I like /2005/04/etc).
I often suggest that type of URI to folks asking about permalinks etc, as that is the method recommended by the w3c (see https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI ).

Now, the problem is that MS Frontpage uses the .htaccess file (which the wordpress mod_rewrite rules must go into) for it’s “publishing” and
“web authoring” configuration. As soon as the wordpress mod_rewrite code is added to the file, two things happen – the permalinks don’t work, and the MS Frontpage Server extensions become corrupted.

I have tried countless ways to get around this, including trying to use rewrite rules that “ignore” the %{HTTP_USERAGENT)% used by Frontpage, to using a second AccessFilename .wpaccess to the httpd.conf file, and a host of other things, and nothing worked so that a person would be able
to both use MS Frontpage to manage the website and use the permalinks for wordpress at the same time.

Until Now.

The solution is acctually quite simple, and I kind of figured it out by accident.

If you are using or wish to use MS Frontpage along with wordpress you’ll need to take the following simple steps on your server (or have your hosting company do it for you).

MS Frontpage creates the following directory
_vti_bin

Nested within that it creates both _vti_adm and _vti_aut

In addition to in your website (or wordpress) root folder in all of those directories you will find a .htaccess file.

In all three of these directories AND in your root directory, at the top of ALL of the .htaccess files you simply need to add one line –
Options +FollowSymlinks

Add that to the top of each file (which may have something like Options None in there already).

Then close and save the files and you’re done.
Now everyhting works perfectly, including MS Frontpage, AND the permalinks of your choosing.

On a personal note, I prefer to use Frontpage to manage/maintain sites, I’ve been using it since around ’96, and by now, since I do most work on UNIX servers anyway I have it configured to use external editors for just about everything, including Zend Studio for php files, Bradbury TopStyle for stylesheets, Adobe ImageReady/Photoshop for images, etc. I’m more or less just using Frontpage as a convenient way to manage the site and access everything, etc. Then when I hit the “save” button in any of the other applications, they have Frontpage save my changes directly to the server, with no need to be FTP’ing files around, etc. It does help to get lots accomplished very quickly, and I was pretty bummed for the past year or so with the permalink frustration, since I was either needing to not use permalinks or not use Frontpage, or keep re-installing the FP extensions. At one point I found a way to make a .htaccess for my “running” site, but then change it to a FP .htaccess when I was doing any work (permalinks of course didn’t work), either way it was a real pain.

This should work with most versions of FP and most of the unix versions of the extensions in use today.

you could go and hack up the appropriate php and template files, then create css classes/id’s for each category, it would require a little work upfront, but would probably be the cleanest and most efficiant solution in terms of server overhead. I have one site which i’m converting to wordpress from “semi-static” content, and it’s separated by topic, i’m more or less just creating categories, then classes/id’s in the css and php to maintain the current look and feel of the site which is a bit different in each topic area.

You should be able to change the permalink style and all old content should work with no problem. It sounds to me like the Frontpage issue, or that mod_rewrite isn’t working/enabled. I kind of like to use frontpage for making changes to sites “on the fly”, and I had it all set up to use TopStyle as the CSS editor and Zend studio for php files, etc. I’ve had to remove the extensions from all the sites on my dedicated box though because I like the “date based” fancy permalinks, first because they bookmark well, second, search engines, google, etc, seems to like them, and that format is very similar to the w3c URI reccomendations, for long term usefulness of content on the internet. So, I’ve chosen to dump MS FP for now, and I’m working on finding a combo of design apps/editors that are similarly easy to work with. I’m still using topstyle for css and zend for php, it’s just that everything isn’t integrated as tightly anymore. I’m looking at Adobe GoLive as a possible FP replacement for general file/site management, html edits, etc, then tying in ZEND/TopStyle for appropriate file types.

I’m viewing on my laptop (which i prefer to work on, it’s an older dell latitiude with 15 inch screen set to 1600×1200 and with large fonts (my eyes aren’t that good). Anyway, You’re theme when all is said and done is under 800px wide (at least the one I just hacked up and sent to you anyway) total (not including the “bacground” which doesn’t really matter. So if I were you I wouldn’t worry too much about the size, etc. I checked it on my desktop which my wife uses more than I do and I have a screen res closer to 800×600 and it still looks just fine.

Just a side note on the screen resolution, I’m responsible for 7 running sites at the moment, and examine the logs/stats on a regular basis, the user base for the sites is quite diverse. They include one site used for a friend’s eBay buisness. Combined, the sites recieve roughly 200,000 Visits (not accesses) weekly. In my develpment/site design efforts, I use the following averages which have been consistent for some time as refelected by all of the log files from each site —

Operating Systems —
97% Some Windows Flavor, over 70% XP Pro/Home.
>1% Linnux/Unix
around 2% Mac

Internet Browsers —
83% IE 5.0-7.0b
15.3% Netscape/Firefox
0.02% Opera
0.03% IE 4.0/3.0
0.75% Netscape 4.0
0.04% Netscape 3.0

Color Depth/Screen Resolution –
97.3% 24 – 32 Bit Color Depth
93.8% 1024×768 OR HIGHER Resolution
4.3% 800×600 Resolution.

Now, I’m sure that something like slashdot or a linux specialty site, or something focused on firefox, etc might get slightly skewed results, but since several of these sites are non-IT related the user base is very diverse.

Personally, I try to keep all of my web development compatible with the most recent “stable” releases of Netscape/Firefox/IE, so that everything looks as I intend it to to “nearly” everyone. I don’t spend [waste] any time doing anything special for or going out of my way for Mac, Opera, Netscape, or even IE for that matter. I have long been a proponent of standards and try to follow as best I can most w3c reccomendations.

In my opinion your own development time can be better spent than by doing anything special to accomadate low res screens, special browser, operating systems etc. The numbers are the numbers, and we have over 12 years worth, so like it or not it’s just what we have to deal with. I actually prefer using Netscape myself and have for a long time, I don’t use it much anymore because so many sites just don’t render correctly.

I made a post a couple days ago where someone was asking about certain colors, websafe pallettes, etc. I don’t think things like that are much of an issue anymore, and the reason is that the stats just don’t support it.

i just took a quick look with IE 6 and then with firefox, to me it almost looks better with IE, it looks like you have a number of browser compatibility issues, with lots of things rendering differently in each browser, which i’m sure wasn’t your intention. I’ve downloaded your zip file and I’ll try to take a look later.

For now, a few quick tips —
1) I like to use TopStyle for editing stylesheets, this program also has the ability to check for cross browser and standards issues. I’ve tried a number of different css editors, and have been stuck on that one as my favorite for a couple of years. Any decent css editor will help avoid most common issues.

2)Use a good HTML editor, I like MS Frontpage (just for the editor), however there are issues with using the FP extensions on wordpress sites, so I don’t use that much when working with wordpress. I’m switching back and forth between a few that I have at the moment, including Adobe GoLive and the built in editor in the Zend PHP Studio system.

3)Use a good php IDE, I’ve been using Zend Studio for the past few years and haven’t found a reason to change.

The point is, just by using quality tools for each type of task, you will be able to avoid many problems which pop up when trying to hand code something. I still make lots of changes on the fly with a unix system porgram like vi or pico, or using the built in wordpress file editors (these tools are all great for on the fly maintainence, however, when doing anything major – like getting a site set up, or overhauling themes, templates, etc. with anyting like wordpress, xoops, etc, using better tools will eliminate most simple errors and typos, etc.

If you’re not into buying software like that then go have a look at sourceforge, there are many high quality tools for all of these tasks available there. I have downloaded and at least tried most of them, some I still use, some not, but you can find great PHP, CSS and HTML tools available there for free.

what version IE are you using ?

were you able to resolve the issue ?

I’ve done a couple of theme re-designs with css for adding Google Ad content to an additional column, i’ve also added divs directly so some of the page body areas for horizontal display of ad content, like between posts, etc.

if you email the css you’re using to me address is chradil at comcast dot net, i’ll paste in some of my “mods” which will add a third column without too much trouble, i’ll also include in my reply some changes you’ll need to make to some template files, with examples similar to what I’m using, and put it all in a zip file. I may not get to this til later this evening, so don’t expect it till tommarow AM.

later…chris

yes, you should be able to change your permalink settings, either the server doesn’t have mod_rewrite working or the MS frontpage extensions are installed. If either is the case your permalinks aren’t going to work unless you either get mod_rewrite working or uninstall the Frontpage extensions.

I’m not getting the errors, everything looks good to me using IE, haven’t checked it with anything else. Browser shouldn’t be an issue. One thought however, depending on how you are setting your permalinks (it looked like they were either off or set to “default” when i checked, and what type of server you’re running on, if the MS Frontpage extensions are installed on the server, permalinks won’t work. Which sounds like the problem you were describing.

I had a little bit of time to take a look at both the html page and the css sheet, and as others have mentioned, — coding errors/typos –.

Stylesheet – in a number of places either the # for and ID or the . for a class were left out. Those were the major things I noticed, i also cleaned it up a bit so that each browser should render it similarly.

HTML — I’m not sure what you were using tags like <quote> or <nyheter> or <date> for, but I turn them into span/class elements.

Take a look at https://www.hradil.us/test/page.html for the page and https://www.hradil.us/test/style.css for the stylesheet, There are still problems which I don’t have the time to look into, so the pages do not yet render the same in each browser, but it’s a start.

couple of other notes, the meta tags in the html header had misplaced " marks and in some cases ; instead of ", I fixed those as well.

You’ve still got some work to do.

I like to use TopStyle Pro for editing/creating stylesheets, and any good HTML editor which color codes the syntax should be fine for catching these types of errors. Also take a look at something like SimpleTidy for windows which runs your html through Tidy for checking/cleaning up html errors, etc.

…chris

A couple of notes —

mattisn – I’ll get back to you on the color specific issue with your site this evening, I’ll have a chance a bit later to take a closer look at the problem.

IE 7 – Yes, I have noted that the CSS support in IE 7.0b is in general outstanding, and in close alignment with w3c standards, there are a couple of positioning/rendering “quirks” at the moment though which are only specific to that version, in otherwords, i’ve done some development using that browser to check for IE and everything was just great, but was horrid in all other browsers, including IE 6, I’ve had a bit of discussion with MS on this issue, and I’m quite sure that it’s just a “beta” type problem and will be resolved by the final release version.

CRT/LCD – That can be/is a HUGE factor in terms of color rendering. I do a fair amount of development on my laptop, and have noticed from time to time that I’ll get something looking really great with certain colors/color groups, but find later that when displayed on a CRT the same colors are really gross looking. I have a tendancy to use colors other than just those which are considered “browser safe” or “web safe” since both of those groups of colors were really meant to address MUCH older versions of internet browsers/monitors/video cards, all of the equipment hardware wise from at least the past 6 or so years can handle colors well beyond the range of browser/web safe palletes. Likewise, “modern” browsers should have no trouble with any color that I’m aware of, although I have seen some browser quirks when using “shorthand” or “named” colors, instead of complete hex numbers.

What version IE are you talking about ? have you double checked to see that your stylesheet isn’t missing a ; or something. I know that there are a number of odd quirks in IE 7.0b (so i’ve uninstalled that from my main machine now), but up through 6.0 i’ve used color schemer studio to create color schemes for sites for a while now and have not come across a color that doesn’t work in any popular modern browser. Normally it’s a coding error on my part.

…chris

This is going to depend on a couple of things like 1) is wordpress installed in the “root” of the domain such as https://www.somthing.com/ or in a sub directory like https://www.something.com/wp

Also, it’s worth noting that there is a “semi-static” home page plugin available, although I’m not using that at the moment. I do however have worpress installed in the root of a number of sites and am using it as the “home” page, with some containing, the most recent posts, others just static content.

There are a number of ways to acomplish this, I just need to know a little more about how you’re set up before letting you know how I would or have gone about it.

fyi, I like the date based permalinks they’re really close to what the w3c reccomends here –

https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI