Okay, some of my personal views.

Starting from FrontPage 2000, things have become better.  FrontPage had been
known to mess up some handwritten code (or code generated by another program
like Dreamweaver,...) but this is no longer the case.  It even keeps clear
of your ASP (well I haven't had problems anymore).

As far as the uploading is concerned, I like FrontPage a lot for my personal
projects.  As long as you know what your doing (don't use cell backgrounds,
marquee,...) it's great.  Just remember if you hand-edit FrontPage code,
chances are it will change it back to how it was (unless you also delete ALL
COMMENTS made by frontpage like <.!-- webbot... -->

I also find it a lot easier to draw Frames and the such.  But for uploading
pages, I must say I always make a backup of the original - you never know.
Up till now, I've done some tasks with it that I thought it would really
mess up, but no no...

I also know a customer whom we set up using FrontPage directly on the
website (so no copies on the local drive).

The publish function then takes care of modified files and the likes.


Apart from that, you mentioned CuteFTP.  There's a few tricks...

First of all, if you open a directory locally and its 'mirror' or remote
directory in CuteFTP and you press F11, it will compare directories.  It
will highlight differing files (don't compare dates...) and you can then
just drag them.  But be careful... for example... you have a page where it
says "Hellp, welcome" which should be "Hello, welcome".  If you compare
those resulting files, they're both equal in size, so it won't know they're
actually different (unless you compare dates, but those are generally reset
by the remote server).

Also in CuteFTP, suppose you have a range of files and directories in the
root of your web.  You make a connection, and drag all of them to the
server.  It will start uploading.  Now... here's the intelligent part of
CuteFTP... if it encounters a file that already exists, it will ask
confirmation to overwrite.  Suppose the file is the same size (as displayed
in the confirmation dialogue) - you say don't overwrite ALL, 'cause you know
they're the same.  Now you said "ALL" but guess what... some files later it
again encounters equal files, but now the size is different.  CuteFTP
handles this as you'd expect it to if it was eh... as human as could be.  It
now will ask for confirmation regarding files that are not equal in size -
you say overwrite ALL.  From now on, no more questions asked.  It will NOT
overwrite files that are equal in size, but WILL overwrite files that
aren't.  Just what you wanted.

The only thing we're missing then is the ability to compare dates.  That
would really make it 100% trustworthy.  But as FTP generally just streams
data to the server and then writes them to disk, giving them a name, it
resets the configuration data (it's not really a 'copy' command).  So no joy
there.


That's as far as I'll go.  I'm sure someone on this list knows more about
the scripting in CuteFTP.  Don't know what it does really and how it can
enhance the power as I didn't use it yet.  But as said... someone else will
have.


Good luck!


- Kayjey -
www.fiatcoupe.net 

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