Up and Running with Frontier Web Site Management
by Matt Neuburg
Author of the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide
It is not terribly hard to convert an existing site to a Frontier-based site.Of course you're going to have to cut out a lot of beginnings and ends of the HTML and have them reside in templates instead, and you may want to modify some of your HTML to take advantage of Frontier's power (for instance, if you have a page made up largely of bulleted lists, especially if they are lists that might change in the future, you'll probably move the lists over into outlines).
Also, you may have to surrender some of your preconceived notions, especially about the organization of your site. Since, in Frontier's architecture, the table/subtable structure has meaning as a way of organizing the hierarchy of directives, your site may have to be considerably rearranged in order to attain the desired effect.
In practice, though, none of this is difficult; in fact it can be a lot of fun.
The thing you most want help with, though, is the tedium of copying and pasting the actual HTML into Frontier word-processing texts. Frontier lets you avoid this tedium with the Import Website command.
You select a table, or something within a table; you are then given a dialog to select a folder whose contents will be loaded from disk into your table as individual word-processing texts.
As you would expect, the structure of the resulting table mirrors the structure of the original folder; subfolders become subtables, and so on. Both text files and pictures (GIFs and JPEGs) will be loaded into this structure.
As it loads files, Frontier performs some conversions on their names in order to give a name to the resulting entry in the table you're loading into. Look at html.normalizeName() to learn more about this if you need to.
All text is by Matt Neuburg, phd, matt@tidbits.com.
For information about the book Frontier: The Definitive Guide, see my home page:
http://www.tidbits.com/matt
All text copyright Matt Neuburg, 1997 and 1998. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No one else has any right to copy or reproduce in
any form, including electronic. You may download this material but you may not post it for others to
see or distribute it to others without explicit permission from the author.
Downloadable versions at http://www.ojai.net/matt/downloads/webTutorial.hqx and http://www.ojai.net/matt/downloads/webTutorial.zip.
Please do not confuse this tutorial with a certain other Frontier 5 tutorial based upon my earlier work.
This page created with
Frontier, 2/11/2000; 7:00:00 PM.