When your Microsoft FrontPage®-based web is published on a Web server, both you and visitors to your Web site can take advantage of features that FrontPage provides. Some of these features require software that is not necessarily part of a standard Web server's configuration: the FrontPage Server Extensions.

What Are the FrontPage Server Extensions?

When you use FrontPage to create or maintain a Web site, some of the features in FrontPage require processing on the Web server. Additionally, when someone visits your FrontPage-based web, they may want to use features on your Web site that also rely on server-side processing. The FrontPage Server Extensions are programs that run on the Web server to do this processing. Features enabled by the FrontPage Server Extensions allow you to include sophisticated technology on your Web pages without having to learn or understand the programming behind them.

You can use FrontPage to create Web content on any Web server; you just need to avoid using the relatively few features that require the FrontPage Server Extensions. For detailed information about features that require the FrontPage Server Extensions, see FP2000: Features Which Require FrontPage 2000 Server Extensions at the Microsoft Personal Support Center.

As a user of FrontPage, what features do I gain from the FrontPage Server Extensions?

If you use FrontPage to create or maintain a Web site, certain features require the FrontPage Server Extensions on the Web server. The most obvious of these features is the ability to edit your web directly from the Web server, by using the site's URL. If you can edit your web by typing http://webname to open it in FrontPage (provided you have proper permissions), then the Web server you're using already has the FrontPage Server Extensions installed.

If you don't edit your web directly on a Web server, then you probably open your web from a disk-based location, such as your hard disk (for example, C:\My Documents\My Webs) or a local area network (for example, \\Network Share\My Workgroup). When editing from a disk-based location, you publish your web to the Web server to make it available to site visitors.

Again, it is immediately apparent whether the Web server to which you're publishing has the FrontPage Server Extensions installed: if you can publish your web using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the Web server has the FrontPage Server Extensions. Otherwise, you can publish your pages using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), by typing ftp://servername instead of http://webname as the location for publishing your web.

Other features that the FrontPage Server Extensions make possible for Web authors and administrators include:

• Setting permissions on a web.
• Locking files so that only one author at a time can modify a page.
• Creating, deleting, and renaming webs and subwebs.
• Automatically updating hyperlinks when you rename files.
• Automatically generating a list of hyperlinks.
• Applying a theme to all the pages in a web.
• Incorporating database access in a web.
• Enabling other Microsoft Office 2000 applications to save directly to a Web server.

The FrontPage Server Extensions functionality is built into the FrontPage application to make these features work when you create a disk-based web (a web on your hard disk rather than on a Web server). When you work with a web that's on a Web server, however, FrontPage communicates with the FrontPage Server Extensions installed on the Web server to make these features work.

Some of these features are available only if the web is on a Web server, rather than your hard disk. For example, you can set permissions on a web only when you open the web on a Web server.

When someone visits my Web site, what features do the FrontPage Server Extensions provide?

When a site visitor browses to a FrontPage-based Web site, certain features on the site may require that the FrontPage Server Extensions be installed on the Web server where the site is published. Without the FrontPage Server Extensions, the following features don't work:

• Search form
• Hit counter
• Discussions
• Form handler and confirmation fields
  

  Note   If your Web server has a custom form handler, you can create forms that will work when visitors browse to your site, even though the Web server doesn't have the FrontPage Server Extensions.

These features also don't work on a disk-based web. Therefore, if you create your web on your hard disk or your local area network, you must publish it to a Web server that has the FrontPage Server Extensions installed in order to run these features. Database access in your web also requires that your Web be published on a Web server.

If you know that the Web server on which you publish your web does not have the FrontPage Server Extensions installed, you can prevent authors from placing components there that require the server extensions. That way, visitors to your site won't be frustrated by trying to use components that don't work.

To restrict the component list to components that don't require FrontPage Server Extensions

1. On the Tools menu, click Page Options.
2. On the Compatibility tab, clear the Enabled with Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions check box.
   When editing a page in Page view, go to the Insert menu and click Component; note that you can no longer select components that rely on the FrontPage Server Extensions.

Making extensions-dependent components unavailable prevents you from adding those components to pages, but nothing prevents you from creating forms or discussion webs. If your Web server doesn't have the FrontPage Server Extensions installed, remember to refrain from adding these features to your web.