WebDeveloper.com Software Review / Microsoft FrontPage 2000

FrontPage 2000:
Why 2K?
(Part 2)

By David Fiedler

What's New, What's Changed?

The first thing to get used to is that when you open FrontPage 2000 and see the familiar Explorer view, you're done. There's no longer a separate editor. This might tend to discourage casual use of FrontPage 2000 for editing a single file -- rather than working on an entire site -- though it isn't really that onerous a program (it takes about 11 MB of RAM: about the same size, in memory, as the previous Editor and Explorer combined).

One of the best new features of FrontPage 2000 is that you no longer have to run your own Web server just to use it! This saves memory and CPU cycles, but it also makes FrontPage less of a security problem.

You can now set up a FrontPage Web in any folder, and conversely, you can open even remotely hosted FrontPage Webs as folders on your own machine, making file management as simple as drag-and-drop. Once you set up a Web on your computer, you can publish it later to a server, whether or not that server has the FrontPage extensions installed.

The automatically-updated navigation bars, one of the best features of FrontPage Webs, have been improved, giving you a bit more control over what pages will be included and adding some more snazzy graphics in some of the themes.

There are tradeoffs. The "WebBots" now are called components, functioning basically the same but hardly as good a name. Gone are the handy little blue arrows that let you easily switch between open documents; instead, you must select one from the Window menu, which won't show you enough of a filename if it's more than 36 characters or so. If you have a FrontPage Web open, you can also click on a filename in the folders view to open or edit a file, but that view takes up more precious screen real estate. Sigh...