Leveraging Your Work

It is not at all hard to convert an existing site to a Frontier-based site. Of course you're going to have to cut out a lot of beginnings and ends of the HTML and have them reside in templates instead, and you may want to modify some of your HTML to take advantage of Frontier's power (for instance, if you have a page made up largely of bulleted lists, especially if they are lists that might change in the future, you'll probably move the lists over into outlines). In practice, though, this is not difficult; in fact it can be a lot of fun.
The thing you most want help with, though, is the tedium of copying and pasting the actual HTML into Frontier word-processing texts. Frontier lets you avoid this tedium with the Import Website command.
You select a table, or something within a table, then choose the Import Website command; you are then given a dialog to select a folder whose contents will be loaded from disk into your table as individual word-processing texts.
As you would expect, the structure of the resulting table mirrors the structure of the original folder; subfolders become subtables, and so on. Both text files and pictures (GIFs and JPEGs) will be loaded into this structure.
If you've been using FrontPage, PageMill, or HomePage to create your pages, Frontier gives you even more of a running start, saving you time by separating out the correct title and removing everything before and after the <body> structure, plus cleaning out <p> tags and performing some basic character conversions.

Name conversions

As it loads files, Frontier performs some conversions on their names in order to give a name to the resulting entry in the table you're loading into.
In case this is not what you want, you have various options you can set using preferences. You provide these by setting them as entries in user.html.prefs, which you may have to create:

dropNonAlphas (if not set to "false") will remove from the name all characters that are not "a" through "z" (upper or lower-case) or a digit.

lowerCaseFileNames (if not set to "false") will convert the name to all lower-case characters.
Also used in the name conversion process are maxFileNameLength and fileExtension, which have already been set for you to correspond to Macintosh usage, at "31" and ".html" respectively.
Only if you have special needs will you wish to change them; the two are used together to determine how many characters might need to be dropped from the end of your file name in order to result in a legal name when the page is published.
If you have more advanced needs, you could write routines of your own to assist with the process of importing and processing material. Frontier is programmable; its default behaviors, clever as they are, are only a beginning.


		© Copyright 1996-98 UserLand Software. This page was last built on 6/17/98; 2:48:16 PM. It was originally posted on 7/4/97; 7:26:41 AM. Webmaster: brent@userland.com.
	This tutorial was adapted for Frontier 5 by Brent Simmons, from the Frontier 4 web tutorial written by Matt Neuburg.