I know what you’re thinking: “are there really still people using FrontPage?” – and the answer is yes. Many hosting companies still offer the FrontPage extensions, and because it is Microsoft software, many people still feel more in their comfort zone with this than with some browser-based content management system like Drupal, Joomla, or WordPress. Actually, Joomla is the only one of those three that is actually a CMS. Drupal’s a framework that can be made into the vision of its creators, but requires more up-front work to get it to that point. For more complex sites it would be worth it though. WordPress is a blogging platform that *can* be used as a CMS, and though it may be a bit of extra work for developers, the fact that many users are now familiar with its interface means an uptick in this trend. More people seem to be using WordPress for content management and not just pure blogging these days. WordPress MU (multi user) together with BuddyPress can be especially powerful for social blogging and interaction.
Migrating a FrontPage site to Joomla
I recently migrated a site from FrontPage to Joomla. I used a very fancy migration tool called Copy & Paste. The site had only a handful of pages so this was no big deal. It just meant saving the graphics to Joomla’s images/stories folder, though even that can often be avoided.
The new Joomla site is not yet live, but I have already turned on SEF (search engine friendly) URLs, which entails an .htaccess file as provided by Joomla. The problem is, FrontPage also uses .htaccess, and whenever you update the FrontPage login credentials, it overwrites the file, rather than updating it and leaving the Joomla parts intact. This means that each time the FrontPage credentials are updated, the Joomla parts have to be added back in. The thing is, with cPanel you can add redirects to htaccess and it will not remove anything from the file. Apparently FrontPage is not capable of this, and takes a more crude approach of simple overwriting the whole thing. It is a minor nuisance, and I suppose I could just wait until the site actually goes live to do the final updates on the file!!
January 1st, 2011 - 12:28
My present site is hosted at BTconnect and has FrontPage Extensions turned on.
What will I have to do to convert the site to a Joomla site on the same server
January 5th, 2011 - 18:42
You need a MySQL database and PHP, so check with your host whether those are available. They may not be if it is a Windows server.
If PHP and MySQL are supported, you might also ask your host whether htaccess and mod_rewrite are supported. That would help enable Joomla’s SEFs (Search Engine Friendly URLs). I consider this critical so if it is not supported, look elsewhere for better hosting.
Assuming your server supports Joomla (view exact technical requirements here), you would then need to edit htaccess to make index.htm the default page, with index.php being secondary. This allows you to develop the Joomla site at /index.php while the general public continues to see the old site at index.htm. This is achieved by adding this line to .htaccess:
DirectoryIndex index.htm index.php
Now you can create the needed pages in Joomla, and then visit each page of the old site, copy the text + images, and paste into the article editor in Joomla. Do not delete any images or image folders from your site; we are reusing the existing HTML code from your site, which will point to the old locations of images, for example http://www.stgabrielsbasingstoke.org.uk/St-Gabriels-Church-animatio1.gif. Using this method you can re-create the pages within Joomla. For each page, add a menu item (Article > Article Layout), in the Main Menu.
Finally, there will need to be a template. This can be a commercial (but customized) one, or a custom one.
We can help you with any or all of this. I will send you an email so we can talk more about this.