FrontPage mass-deletes too easily!

August 24, 2005 1:12 PM

FrontPage 2003 deleted my remote files! How can I prevent this in the future/make FrontPage respect the nature of a multi-contributor site?

I am the Webmaster at a small university that uses FrontPage to maintain its website because we have essentially a blanket license for MS products (i.e., it's a budget thing). We have several content managers responsible for various areas of the site. I, on the other hand, often make changes and add pages to all sections of our site.

The problem is that if a content manager clicks the "Synchronize" button. Frontpage uploads their files to the server, and deletes any new ones I may have put there! It is syncing the server to the local machine.

This obviously won't work with several people contributing content to the site. Suggestions? Is there a way to disable that darn Synchronize button? The only thing I can think of is to remove delete permissions from the FTP accounts. However, that will still enable people to overwrite newer versions with a local copy they downloaded a million years ago.

Google say there aren't a lot of other people out there with this problem...what am I doing wrong?

Baseline: Working with FrontPage in a multi-contributer environment, how can I ensure FrontPage respects newer, server versions. Most other programs have a "Really overwrite newer version on server?" prompt, but FP just massacres the files with a single click. Help!

posted by CaptApollo to computers & internet (3 comments total)

If budget is the reason you're sticking with MS products, you could also check out some free software (free in both senses) like Bluefish or Nvu

You might also want to look into a revision control system to make sure people don't undo other people's work in the future. Again there are many free options (like CVS), but if you are more confortable in MS land (and it's available to you for free) you should take a look at MS SourceSafe. I've worked with it, and it's not as bad as some of the MS haters (with whom I generally agree) say.
posted by TonyRobots at 2:17 PM on August 24, 2005

Another reason to get a revision control system (or RCS) in place is that if something *does* get fouled up (and it inevitably will), you can always easily rollback to a previous working release.
posted by TonyRobots at 2:19 PM on August 24, 2005

I'm in a similar position as you are - working with Frontpage in a University environment - and I have the opposite problem. I can't get Frontpage to save newer files over older ones, as it asks me everytime "[filename] is newer than [filename] on server! Continue? Yes / No" or something to that effect.

It did not always to do this, but it started becoming so attentive after we installed Norton AntiVirus across our network. I do not know how this could effect Frontpage, but all I know is ever since then Frontpage checks the file dates every single time.
posted by Servo5678 at 3:02 PM on August 24, 2005