Chapter 9. Using FrontPage Legacy Components
Understanding the types of Web components
Inserting Web components
Creating forms
One of the most commonly used features of FrontPage is Web components, which provide prewritten functionality for use in Web sites. Web components, such as FrontPage forms, search forms, page hit counters, etc., offered with FrontPage have been quite popular and are used exceedingly on Web sites that support FPSE. The readiness and ease of usage of these Web components make them a choice for many Web site designers looking to quickly implement advanced Web site operations. SharePoint Designer inherits most of these Web components from FrontPage 2003 and allows Web site designers to use them on FPSE-based and, in some cases, SharePoint Web sites.
Each of these Web components provides an effortless interface that allows Web designers to set their properties and attributes. After a Web component is inserted on a Web page, a designer configures its properties by using the SharePoint Designer user interface and then saves the Web page. At runtime, based on the properties set for the Web component, a server-side code (usually implemented by FPSE or SharePoint) renders the HTML for the Web component to be displayed in a browser so that a Web site visitor can interface with the component. In this way, the Web component hides its code implementation from the Web designer, allowing him or her to simply make some settings for the component rather than having to think about coding the actual implementation of the functionality that the Web component offers.
To begin this chapter, I discuss how many of these Web components provide functionality that can now be obtained by using other advanced and more contemporary technologies, such as ASP.NET 2.0. Hence, I named these Web components here as FrontPage legacy components. If you're looking at developing new Web sites, my recommendation is to consider using ASP.NET 2.0 and other relatively new technologies to implement the features provided by these components. My intention in this chapter is to help you understand how to use Web components so that if you run into a Web site implementation that uses these Web components, you can use SharePoint Designer to maintain such Web sites effectively and develop suitable migration strategies.
This chapter discusses the FrontPage legacy components available in SharePoint Designer. These include components such as forms; search components; included content such as substitution, included pages, etc.; hit counters; and a table of contents, among others. I start by first broadly classifying these components based on the Web server requirements. Then, I introduce you to these Web components and show how you can insert and configure them on Web pages by using SharePoint Designer.