folders

[suegal]

Hello, I am trying to replace the shared borders in FrontPage 2003, when I am finished should I remove ALL of the folders that have an underscore before them or just rebove the borders folder that hAs the underscore? Thank you for your help.

[SteveW]

Hi suegal and welcome to the forum,

Definitely do not delete ALL the folders with underscores in their names. _borders is the one that contains information specifically for the borders. The other folders store information for other things that your site may still be using, such as themes and navbar button images.

Basically, when you're done, I would suggest not deleting any folders yourself. Let FrontPage decide. If FrontPage thinks the folder should be deleted, it will do it. It might delete the folder when you turn off support for shared borders at FrontPage > Tools > Page Options > Authoring.

If you already deleted the folder, it is probably no harm done. If FP thinks it needs the folder, it will probably recreate it.

[suegal]

Hello, Thank so much for the info, Using this website as a guide, I am trying to make our website to be toally unindepedent on server extensions, so I will have to change the nav bars and themes (or remove them) as well, any additional advice is greatly appreciated. Sue G.

[SteveW]

As you probably saw, there are articles about doing the navbars and themes, and some other things, as well. If you have problems, feel free to ask.

There are a few webbot conversions that I haven't gotten around to writing articles for yet. If you think you might have trouble converting a webbot that I haven't written about yet, let me know what it is, and I'll try to move that article higher in the to-do list.

[suegal]

Thanks a bunch, I will continue reading, by the way the site is great and VERY helpful, it is the only one I have found that has such detail, and I have been looking for quite a while.

[suegal]

Hello, Just want to double check before continuing on here, are the nav bars and theme dependent on FrontPage server extensions? I know the shared borders are, so far I have removed the shared borders only, thanks in advance. Sue

[suegal]

oops, nevermind I see that the are dependent

[suegal]

Hello, Here I am back again with a question... I am trying to convert the nav bars to html as descrbed in Part 2 - Converting webbot link bars to HTML link bars , and I am a bit confused, any help is appreciated, thanks Sue G

[SteveW]

The navbar webbot doesn't generate any HTML code until the page is saved. And whenever you re-open the page in FrontPage, that HTML is removed and the "webbot" line put in its place, so the only way you can see the (end result) HTML is to open the page in Notepad.

Once you have the HTML that you got from Notepad, you can edit it (if desired) and then put it into the code of the page where the webbot line was, thus getting rid of the webbot and replacing it with the plain HTML code.

That's probably the first thing that might be causing confusion.
The second might be about all the JavaScript that I removed when I did the procedure?

[suegal]

Hello, Haven't gotten to the second part yet, I am confused on the first part.. when I open the page in notepad the code looks exactly the same as the page where the webbot tag is, I do not see any extra html code, any thoughts on this? thanks

[SteveW]

I'm looking through my old files to try to figure out why.

Is the navigation webbot inside an include file, instead of being directly in a main page? If so, maybe try this:

Instead of opening the included page in Notepad,
1. open in FrontPage one of your main pages that includes the included file,
2. then preview the main page in your browser (F12), and
3. then View Source.

This is the only way I can get the HTML to show when the Navigation webbot is inside an include file.
Also, when I do it this way, I get the navigation link code to show, but it's not between webbot tags. The webbot tags specifying the included page are there, but the webbot tags defining the navigation webbot that is inside the included page are not there. But the code for the navbar is there.

Here's a snippet of my old Global navbar code that I found using the method above. It gives you some idea what you're looking for. The images are the buttons, and yours will have names with something other than "myjournal1010" in them. It will be based on the name of the theme you use:

<p align="left">
<a href="index.htm">
<img src="_derived/home_cmp_myjournal1010_gbtn.gif" width="90" height="25" border="0" alt="Home" align="middle"></a>
<a href="news.htm"><img src="_derived/news.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_gbtn.gif" width="90" height="25" border="0" alt="News" align="middle"></a>
<a href="aboutus.htm"><img src="_derived/aboutus.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_gbtn.gif" width="90" height="25" border="0" alt="About Us" align="middle"></a>
...lots more...

The article describes a bunch of JavaScript that's mixed in with the HTML, but only some types of navbars have the JS in them. A Global navbar doesn't have it, and a Banner webbot doesn't, either. I think only navbars of the type s-type="children" have the JS. It changes the button color when hovered.

[suegal]

I will give this a try, thank you for the info.

[suegal]

Hello, Ok, I can see some code similar to the snippet you show aboove in the regular pages, but in the border file where the bottom , left, & top border files are all I see is this:

!--webbot bot="Navigation" s-orientation="vertical" s-rendering="graphics" s-theme="Ice 0000" s-type="children" b-include-home="FALSE" b-include-up="FALSE" startspan --><em>[Add this page to the Navigation view to display hyperlinks here]</em><!--webbot bot="Navigation" i-checksum="20961" endspan -->

I am still confused as to what I should do for these files in the border folder, any help is appreciated, Sue G.

[SteveW]

Hello, Ok, I can see some code similar to the snippet you show aboove in the regular pages, but in the border file where the bottom , left, & top border files are all I see is this:

!--webbot bot="Navigation" s-orientation="vertical" s-rendering="graphics" s-theme="Ice 0000" s-type="children" b-include-home="FALSE" b-include-up="FALSE" startspan --><em>[Add this page to the Navigation view to display hyperlinks here]</em><!--webbot bot="Navigation" i-checksum="20961" endspan -->

The part that I made bold is normal when FP is attempting to display a navbar on a page (such as a border page) that isn't (and shouldn't be) part of the site's navigation structure. The reason is that the webbot doesn't have any data upon which to base the construction of the navbar, e.g. which pages are this page's children? Answer: none.  When the border is included into a "real" page, that data becomes available to FP and it can construct a real navbar.

I think the key here will be to construct your navbar using the HTML navbar code from a "real" page (rather than the border page), and then put the resulting non-webbot code into your include file (the border file), to replace the webbot there. In other words, you can't do the whole procedure using only the border page. You'll need to do the procedure on a real page and then put the results into the border.

Is this one navbar used on every page throughout the site? And,
does it display the same links on every page?
I'm thinking probably not, since it refers to child pages, and different pages will have different children.

When you go through this procedure of replacing automated navbars with manual ones, you are losing FrontPage's automated methods (the "Navigation structure") of determining which page is a child of which other page.

What this means in practice is that you may not be able to use one single navbar (contained in an include file) throughout the site. If every page currently has its own peculiar set of navigation buttons based on its children, you'll have to put new navbar HTML code in each individual file, customized so that it displays the same buttons as it did when FrontPage was doing the "child" calculations. (A somewhat more complicated method would be to use a PHP include file to build the navbar on each page, and have the PHP code calculate which buttons to include based on which page it's processing.)

On thinking about this, I think I'm getting a better idea how your site might currently be laid out, and this navbar conversion may turn out to be rather more complicated than it looked at first. It may well involve having to abandon the current "show children" navbar that is in the border file, and instead putting custom navbar code into each page at the appropriate location. Once you have developed one navbar, however, on one page, and understand how it works, you may find that the many copy/paste/modify actions needed throughout the site might not be too terrible a task, though I can't say it will be simple.

I came up with the following earlier this morning, and will go ahead and post it in case it is useful, but I'd suggest doing it only on a copy of the site as an experiment. I think it is likely not to end up doing what you want. What it will accomplish is to put the same plain HTML navbar on every page of the site. But it doesn't take child pages or the Navigation structure into account at all.

Even if it doesn't get the desired result, getting the hang of working with the code is likely to be helpful as preparation for the larger project to follow.

-----

Try the following using one regular page and one border page. (At least make copies of both files somewhere outside your website so you can easily revert to those original versions if something goes wrong. It would probably be even better to make a copy of the entire website and do the experiment on the copy, just in case.)

1. Open the regular page (one that is listed in the Navigation structure) in Notepad so you can get the code snippet that you described as "similar to the one above".
2. Copy that code out of the page.
3. Find the border page where that navbar actually is stored, and open it in FrontPage Code View.
4. Delete the webbot that defines the navbar, and paste the copied code snippet in its place.
5. The paths referenced in the copied code snippet will contain relative links. Adjust all the paths so they correctly describe where the target file is in relation to the border file (the file you're working in at the moment).
6. Save or close the files.
7. Find a page that includes the border you just modified.
8. Preview the page in your browser and see if the output is correct.

[suegal]

Hello, Indeed this is going to be a much more complicated task than I thought, as the sight is very large, currently we have a nav bar at the top and on the left side, however the buttons are not the same on all pages, I assume because some are child pages, in these instances the nav bar will show an "up button". I am using a copy and will try what you have suggested, I almost think it might be easier to start over rebuilding the whole site from scratch, which would take some time, but I am not familiar enough on how to get the graphic buttons to display as they do now, anyway I will plug on with it and see how far I can get, thanks a lot for the info, Sue G

[SteveW]

I almost think it might be easier to start over rebuilding the whole site from scratch.

I don't think there's any danger that will be necessary. I've been thinking more about this, and may be close to a solution that only involves some global search and replace operations.

I updated the article at http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20070627.htm to add some new paragraphs that might help explain why you've been seeing what you've been seeing. Basically, the same navbar included into 1000 different pages will generate 1000 different navbars because each page has different children.

However, each of those pages does currently have its unique navbar code in it, including its own properly calculated "Up" button. You should see the code for the navbar in each page if you open it in Notepad. ("real" pages only. As you discovered, you won't see anything useful by opening border pages in Notepad).

The key to the solution is that we must do something that preserves the code already in each file, and prevent FrontPage from ever modifying that code again. To put it another way, every time you open a (real) page in FrontPage, it strips out the HTML for its navbar and puts the webbot there instead. When you save the page, it recalculates the navbar again as it saves the file. We have to stop it from doing that. The code we want to keep is already in the page. We have to stop FrontPage from messing with it.

To accomplish that, we have to stop FP from including the include page. We want the code from the include page (including the pre-calculated navbar code) to be left in the file, but never get changed again. It becomes static text in the source code of the page.

You can't delete the included page, because then FP will strip all the code out of every page where that included page is included.

Instead, without changing the include page itself, we have to go directly to the "real" pages and strip out all the webbot tags that cause the included page to be included. This will leave all the pre-calculated code in the page and prevent it from ever being changed again by FrontPage's automated methods. You can change it yourself manually anytime.

I should have something by tomorrow. I was about to post it tonight, but then discovered it may require regular expressions to handle the varying "checksums" in the closing webbot tags.

Do you use include files for anything other than the borders?

[suegal]

I will have to look to see, I think there are more page includes because we had shared borders as well (which I have already turned off), I will look at it some more to see what else might be an included page, and I will keep reading the info on your site, it is very helpful and much appreciated.

[SteveW]

I added to the article a new Section 4) about how to handle webbot navbars inside include pages.

It's supposed to be step by step and understandable, but this may be one of those things that is easier to do than to describe. If you encounter situations that it doesn't anticipate, let me know.

It's strange that I don't remember encountering this when I did the conversion on my site. There was an s-type="children" webbot in my top border that was included into every page, but at some point I decided it served no useful purpose because on every page it only duplicated links that were already present in the body text. So it's possible I got rid of that webbot before doing the conversion, or as part of it. 

I'm going to post some other text here without much explanation. It may be useful as reference in some situations, but doesn't belong in the article, which is already very long.


This text from one of my old pages shows the kind of text to look for when you open a "real" page in Notepad to find its webbot code:

<!--webbot bot="Include" U-Include="myincludes/top.htm" TAG="BODY" startspan -->

This text between the two red webbot tags was what was pulled in by the top.htm include.
The key to the conversion is to, on every page that includes top.htm, remove the (red) webbot tags that delimit this text, but leave this text in between unchanged.
 
<p align="left"><font size="5">25 Years of Programming</font></p>
<p align="left"><b><font size="2">An open source source for C, C++, OWL, BASIC, MDB, XLS, DOT, and more...</font></b></p>
<p align="left">
This was a "global" navbar. It would normally have its own delimiting webbot tags, but because it came from an include file, it doesn't.
<a href="index.htm"><img src="_derived/home_cmp_myjournal1010_gbtn.gif" width="90" height="25" border="0" alt="Home" align="middle"></a>
<a href="news.htm"><img src="_derived/news.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_gbtn.gif" width="90" height="25" border="0" alt="News" align="middle"></a>
<a href="aboutus.htm"><img src="_derived/aboutus.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_gbtn.gif" width="90" height="25" border="0" alt="About Us" align="middle"></a>
<br>
This was an s-type="banner" navbar. It would normally have its own delimiting webbot tags, but because it came from an include file, it doesn't.
<img src="_derived/projects.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_bnr.gif" width="722" height="95" border="0" alt="Projects">
<br>
This was a s-type="children" navbar. It would normally have its own delimiting webbot tags, but because it came from an include file, it doesn't.
<script language="JavaScript"><!--
MSFPhover =
  (((navigator.appName == "Netscape") &&
  (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 3 )) ||
  ((navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer") &&
  (parseInt(navigator.appVersion) >= 4 )));
function MSFPpreload(img)
{
  var a=new Image(); a.src=img; return a;
}
// --></script><script language="JavaScript"><!--if(MSFPhover) { MSFPnav1n=MSFPpreload("msvcpp/_derived/index.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_hbtn.gif"); MSFPnav1h=MSFPpreload("msvcpp/_derived/index.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_hbtn_a.gif"); } // --></script><a href="msvcpp/index.htm" language="JavaScript" onmouseover="if(MSFPhover) document['MSFPnav1'].src=MSFPnav1h.src" onmouseout="if(MSFPhover)  document['MSFPnav1'].src=MSFPnav1n.src"><img src="msvcpp/_derived/index.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_hbtn.gif" width="144" height="21" border="0" alt="MS VC++ .NET" align="middle" name="MSFPnav1"></a> <script language="JavaScript"><!--if(MSFPhover) { MSFPnav2n=MSFPpreload("borland40owl20/_derived/index.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_hbtn.gif"); MSFPnav2h=MSFPpreload("borland40owl20/_derived/index.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_hbtn_a.gif"); } // --></script><a href="borland40owl20/index.htm" language="JavaScript" onmouseover="if(MSFPhover) document['MSFPnav2'].src=MSFPnav2h.src" onmouseout="if(MSFPhover) document['MSFPnav2'].src=MSFPnav2n.src"><img src="borland40owl20/_derived/index.htm_cmp_myjournal1010_hbtn.gif" width="144" height="21" border="0" alt="OWL 2.0" align="middle" name="MSFPnav2"></a>
There was a ton more code for this navbar...
</p>

<!--webbot bot="Include" i-checksum="28482" endspan -->


Edit: September 5, 2008 1:12 AM

suegal, I was moving the website to a new server when you made your last post, so I'm reposting it here as a quote rather than transfer the messageboard database. The transfer was so nearly flawless    that I don't want to risk creating a problem where there isn't one.

I appreciate the added info, thanks.

Thanks for pointing out the need to address this situation.

[suegal]

Hello, It has been a while since I have had time to work with this conversion I am attempting, but I am looking at it a little bit today. In a given "regular" page I have the webbot includes that I have inserted using your instructions, they look like this:
<!--webbot bot="Include" U-Include="borders/right.htm" TAG="BODY" startspan --><!--webbot bot="Include" i-checksum="0" endspan --> I also have the same thing for borders/top and borders/bottom etc. Is this where I need to  remove the webbot tags and leave the rest of the remaining code? Many thanks in advance, Sue G.

[SteveW]

If you're looking at this file in Notepad, there should be text (navbar code) between the two tags, and I believe the checksum should not be "0". The fact that it's 0 would seem to confirm that FrontPage believes the file right.htm is empty.

<!--webbot bot="Include" U-Include="borders/right.htm" TAG="BODY" startspan -->
There should be navbar code in here.
<!--webbot bot="Include" i-checksum="0" endspan -->

Check the file borders/right.htm and make sure it has in it whatever content it is supposed to. If it's supposed to have a navbar webbot in it, then in FrontPage Code View it should have a webbot tag, but without any startspan/endspan.

However, I was under the impression that your navbar was in the left border. 

Is it possible that you were using a right border but it is intentionally empty? If that's the case, then yes, you can remove the webbot tags and leave "nothing" behind, and that's what you want since the border had nothing in it, anyway.

The code you provided does seem to be the right location to remove the webbot tags but leave the other text behind. It's just that in the case of this right border, it looks like you won't be leaving anything behind.

Maybe check the left border, as well, and see if it has code where it should, to better match the example given, and also a non-zero checksum. That would be a more promising indicator.

-----
When you want to see if something is right, you can test it on a single page:

1. Open the page in Notepad, copy all its text, paste it into another Notepad file outside of FrontPage, and save it.
2. Make the proposed change in the original file (the one in FrontPage) whose text you just copied.
3. If the change doesn't go well, close the test file in FrontPage, open it in Notepad, get all its original text from the external file where you saved it, and paste it back into the file, and save it. It is now restored to its original form.