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FrontPage Server Extensions for Unix?
beetle496 asks: "Okay, so I didn't research my choice of ISP adequately. Despite running Apache 2.0 on Red Hat, the only option for dynamic content they support is FrontPage Server Extensions. I am quite comfortable with X/HTML and CSS, and am okay with JavaScript. I am annoyed enough that I would buy FrontPage, were it available for my preferred platform. I've performed the customary MSDN and Google searches. The best I came up with was a page on FrontPage UNIX Server Extensions, which sounds exactly on target, but didn't help me. Can anyone point me toward a resource on writing HTML code to make use of FPSE (aka, webbot) -- without using FrontPage?"
As other people have mentioned, FPSE is obsolete. Today, you are supposed to use client-side dynamic (webbot, DTC, add-in) or more modern server-side dynamic (ASP) techniques. A lot of things including navigation can be handled design-time, reply or email if you're interested in that topic. I do everything design-time; it's my preferred method, and FP2003 is my preferred tool.
However you can still use a webbot for server-side dynamic behavior. Visit MSDN and download the Frontpage 2002 SDK. Don't worry, it's not outdated. The extensibility models haven't changed between versions.
With a perl script, it's the same as a standard CGI script as described on MSDN. Look for the example \FPSDK\Files\WebBot\wbtest4 in the SDK. If you prefer to use a DLL or shared library, use the BeginWebBotExpand macro which lets you access the bot attributes. In either case, you're going to build a BTL file and call the webbot from HTML like:
The SDK describes the four ways a webbot can activate. Try to test things client-side first, it's a lot easier. If your webbot fails it will just insert a generic [FrontPage Component name] on the page. Doublecheck the logs in _vti_pvt for the logs, to get hint why things are failing.
It's oldschool, it works, and it's a simple variant on CGI scripting. Again, for simple things like navigation bars it's a heck of a lot easier to use a design-time dynamic control (client-side webbot, DTC, or add-in). I strongly recommend you consider those instead.