Re-installing frontpage extensions kills htaccess file?

[BlueNoteWeb]

One of my clients has found that every time he re-installs frontpage extensions, it kills all of his .htaccess files. This results in all kinds of problems that I'm sure you can imagine. How do I prevent this from happening?

 

[nobaloney]

FrontPage websites and .htaccess files were never really meant to work well together; MS servers didn't understand them, so Microsoft didn't either, back when FrontPage was written.

That said, there's a years-old post (on a different fourm) here which may help you.

Jeff

 

[BlueNoteWeb]

The evils of frontpage are well known, and I've tried to discourage this client from using it. Still he insists.

The problem he's reporting (I've tested and can duplicate it) is that the act of installing the frontpage extensions through DirectAdmin removes all .htaccess files throughout the domain. From reading the thread that you linked me to I understand why the .htaccess files need to be accessed when installing the extensions. I agree with what the author has to say about Microsoft's intelligence and intentions in using that filename. However, I would expect DirectAdmin to plan that function out a bit better - rather than nuking the .htaccess file entirely, why not write whatever FP needs onto the end of the file?

 

[DirectAdmin Support]

Hello,

The reason we added it was because without having then all removed first, there were absolutely countless support emails about frontpage not working.
Any weird setting in the .htaccess files will break frontpage totally, so they're all removed. I'm pretty sure we're not the only ones who do it that way.

If a user goes the frontpage route, then they're recommended to stick only with frontpage for file upload and not muck about with doing things manually on top of that for permission reasons, or changing files they shouldn't be. (the fact that they're using frontpage in the first place may indicate they're not as farmiliar with manual things, and have a higher tendancy to break things)

Yes, you can edit the htaccess files after you enable frontpage, but FP has several settings it needs to be exactly a certain way, so having other things setup ahead of time is far more likely to break.

John