Review
Rather than listing all of the changes from the old versions I've added a link to the Microsoft version comparison chart in the headlines section on the right. I'm going to highlight a few of what I consider to be the best of the "new" features in FrontPage 2003.
- Replacement of Java based hover buttons with javascript based behaviors. One of the biggest complaints about FrontPage has been the use of proprietary code or non-standard code. While hover buttons are not proprietary in the sense that they require a Microsoft product to run but they do require that the browser have the Java Virtual Machine installed whether it is the Microsoft distribution (discontinued) or the Sun distribution .
- Split pane view - to me this is one of the most important features but I tend to be a bit more obsessive about the code I put on my site than most WYSIWYG users
- Intellisense brought in from Visual Studio, no more typos inside your html.
- Improvements to the tabbed interface with a "breadcrumb" of tags so you can see at a glance where you are in the site structure.
- DWT - Dynamic Web Templates to replace shared borders. This is actually a better option since it doesn't have the limitations on page placement that shared borders have. In addition you can take existing pages, remove the shared borders and stuff the inside the template without having to rewrite every page. On pages created from new templates you have better control over where/where not you place editable regions.
- Choice of Classic ASP or ASP.NET for database results and database interface.
- Global find and replace that lets you use more than short static text as the find criteria.
- Code snippets though the interface could stand a bit of improvement.
- Accessibility checker, while you will still want to validate against external checkers having an integrated tool makes it easier to check as you create the page/site.
What I don't like
There are problems with the way Microsoft implemented Dynamic Web Templates that limit their use to those people who design only on Disk Based Webs and do not work on a web server with FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) installed.
A disk based web is simply a folder on your hard drive that has a design time version of FrontPage Server Extensions installed on it. The DWT problem arises because while there are no new FPSE extensions for web servers there is a new version for disk based webs. It is these extensions that to the work of keeping track of what pages use FrontPage includes, shared border, navigation webbots and dynamic web templates. Only the design time extensions for FrontPage 2003 know what a design time template is therefore only FrontPage disk based webs will honor the template mark-up. While at first glance this doesn't seem to be a big problem many people myself included work directly on a local web server. In my case it is IIS 5.1 running on XP Pro. Since I have several older webs and some Visual Studio.NET projects that use FrontPage Server Extensions I have them installed on my localhost web server for testing purposes.
As a result if I use a dynamic web template on any site in my wwwroot folder the extensions installed on the server apply and the editable region code is not honored. Pages do not update and I can edit regions that are supposed to be locked.
In additon one of the best features of FrontPage is that anywhere I am that has an internet connection if I have FrontPage available I can do a quick update directly on the web server but to do that requires FrontPage Server Extensions which means that I cannot use a template to create or update live using a template.
FrontPage with the new version has improved dramatically but there needs to be an update to the FrontPage Server Extensions to make the most of the new features.