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FrontPage and FrontPage Extensions
By: Jim Horrill
It has been announced recently that Microsoft are withdrawing FrontPage from their product range. I?m not a great fan of this particular piece of software, but a lot of people are and there are a lot of FrontPage built websites in existence.
There are some concerns however, about the future of existing FrontPage websites and, in particular, those using FrontPage extensions. These extensions are what power the ?bells and whistles? inherent in the software that made it worth using. The extensions provide such dynamic addons as:
* Forms processing
* Themes
* Search form
* Bulletin board
* Security
* Hit counter
* Database features
The concern is that Microsoft are withdrawing support for the software itself and for the extensions. If you have a website built with Frontpage then the server on which the website is hosted will need to support extensions. At worst, once Microsoft have withdrawn, hosts will remove from their servers the extension support and the website will no longer function as designed. At best, the hosts will leave things as they are until the first bug / security threat unviels itself and then be forced to withdraw.
The replacement product has now been renamed Expression and is a completely new product and therefore is not compatible with FrontPage, therefore FrontPage extensions are dead. Expression has only been released in beta format so there is, as yet, no official release and the future looks bleak for any FrontPage websites.
