Batch convert FrontPage subwebs to folders?

February 15, 2006 12:55 PM

Goodbye FrontPage! How do I get rid of all these subwebs?

My institution will no longer be using FrontPage to maintain its website; I'm ecstatic. How do I convert all the subwebs in our sizable site to folders? Is there a way to do this without FrontPage? We don't use any of the FrontPage functionality that this would affect, so that's not an issue.

posted by CaptApollo to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Let me see if I understand: FrontPage makes "subwebs" which are actually folders with many _vti files and folders? As far as I know the _vti and _private stuff is only useful to FrontPage and can be dumped. This leaves you with folders full of perfectly good html files. You will of course be left with an assload of badly mangled code. Might want to run it all through HTML Tidy or something to strip out the proprietary FrontPage extensions and crap.

I converted a FrontPage site over to run on Apache several years ago: My basic procedure was to 1) dump all the _vti garbage that FrontPage leaves about; 2) rename *.htm into *.html (may not be an issue to you - but this site was ancient before I took it over) and rename every instance of default.htm(l) to index.html, and 3) clean up the code to remove FrontPage garbage and make it valid.

Using Apache I added rewrite rules such that any incoming call for *.htm would return a "moved permanently" to the caller and automatically redirect to the new file. Same went for default.htm(l), just caught all requests and sent a "moved" notice while redirecting to the root of that folder - that is, calls to "subdir/default.htm" were redirected to "subdir/" which is easier to maintain - specifying a link to the default index file is really only necessary if you're aiming at a specific anchor within that file. Redirecting in this way also ensures that Google, etc. will start to cache the correct link.

If you are still running IIS (hopefully not) you can skip step 2, as IIS will probably still look for the godawful default.htm as the standard index file. As for code cleanup, well, I stripped out ALL html aside from links and rewrote the thing using CSS. As it was a relatively small site I did this by hand.

I think HTML Toolkit has a batch utility that can run HTML Tidy on a folder and subdirectories. As always, do your tests on a backup, and make sure everything works before going live with it.
posted by caution live frogs at 1:21 PM on February 15, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks for the thorough answer. Somehow the subweb folders are flagged as non-normal (they have folder with a globe on it as their icon), and some non MS programs act weirdly with them (not seeing their modified dates for instance). When I "convert to folder" using FrontPage, the issue is resolved. I think it's something more than just deleting those vti files. But what? and is FrontPage the only way to undo it?
posted by CaptApollo at 5:16 PM on February 15, 2006