About This Tutorial

Royal Road

A legend has it that an ancient king, tired of the step-by-step, proof-by-proof progression of his mathematics lessons, complained to his teacher and asked, in effect, whether they couldn't jump ahead to the good stuff. The reply was: "Your majesty, there is no Royal Road to geometry."

With Frontier, happily, that's not true. Frontier provides you with plenty of power to get started quickly; you can go back and learn the details later. Let's start enjoying Web site management with Frontier.

Versions of Frontier

Frontier is a free application and database, which progresses constantly in response to user needs and ideas. Revisions become available for download fairly frequently. This tutorial is geared to Version 5.0.1 of Frontier, revision 39 (or later) of the database. Since this is a hands-on tutorial, if you have not started with a clean download of 5.0, your experience may differ from what is described here.

To download the Frontier application and the clean database, see:

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/download.html

Obtaining the most recent revision of the database may not be crucial to your experience of the tutorial, but just in case, here's how to do it. First, point your browser to:

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/fastTrack/rootUpdates.html

When the Web page has finished loading into your browser, save its source as a file to disk. Start up Frontier, choose Open from the File menu, and open the saved source of that Web page. Say OK to the dialog that appears. A window will appear, whose first line says "Installer". Click the triangle at the left end of that line (to select the whole line), and choose Run Selection from the Main menu. When asked if you want to back up the database, you can say No; when asked if you want to install new parts of the database, say Yes -- that's what you're here for. The rest is automatic.

Platforms

As you probably know, Frontier is cross-platform: there is a Mac version (68K and PPC-native) and a Windows version (NT and 95) of the application, but the core of the database is identical for both. You can transfer parts of the database (or even an entire database!) from one platform to the other.

Because of this, I don't know whether you're using Mac or Windows. I happen to have a Mac. So I tend to think in Mac-like terms: I say "folder" instead of "directory", for instance. Windows users, though, should (I hope!) have no difficulty following along. Screen shots are a mix of Mac and Windows, and everything I say is intended to be identically true of both platforms; where the interface or behavior of the two platforms differs, I have explicitly said so, showing Windows information in square brackets after the Mac information.

So, for example: "the name of the Frontier application is UserLand Frontier [Frontier.exe]".

Versions of this tutorial

This is the Frontier 5 Web site management tutorial written by me, Matt Neuburg, author of the Frontier 4.2.3 Web site management tutorial and of the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide. I take full responsibility for it, and am glad to answer questions about it.

There exists another Frontier 5 Web site management tutorial distributed with Frontier 5 and hosted at scripting.com, with which my name is associated because it is an edited version of my Frontier 4.2.3 tutorial. It is not, however, my work; I cannot take responsibility for it or answer questions about it. Thank you for being aware of this.

Gratitude

This tutorial has benefitted from suggestions, questions, corrections, and encouragement by readers of earlier versions, as well as from the generous sharing of inventiveness and expertise (through the mailing lists) that characterizes the Frontier community. Since I can't thank each individually, thanks, one and all. You know who you are.