[AccessD] OT: FrontPage Websites

We've had a lot of talk about web interfaces, and a thought occurred to
me that I felt like sharing.

 

When I built a handful of pages, I tend to use Microsoft Scripting
Editor.  It's a very handy tool.  But I tend to write most of my web
pages by hand.  With the scripting editor, the HTML stuff is
intellisensed, so it just pours onto the page.

 

However, when it comes to an actual site, I use FrontPage.  FrontPage is
loaded with all sorts of nifty tools when dealing with an actual site.
One of the nicest features is FrontPage's navigation feature.  When you
build a site in FrontPage, you can add pages to it's navigation.  The
Navigation is represented in FrontPage like a big visio chart.  You can
drag pages into it, move them around (by dragging), even add external
links.  It's pretty handy.  The only catch with it's navigation, is
using it on the site.  FrontPage provides 'canned' tools to use with
it's navigation. You can put a page banner on a page, and menus, but
they are all provided by FrontPage and are not truly customizable.  

 

So a few years ago, I reversed engineered FP's navigation.  It turns out
that it stores it's navigation in a delimited flat file called
structure.cnf.  

 

Take a look at http://www.marlow.com <http://www.marlow.com/>  .  All of
the navigation stuff uses FP's navigation structure, read by a VB .dll.
So the menu's are javascripts (for look and animation), created by asp
code using the VB .dll's information.  This information is used for the
top menu (side menus that some pages have), the bottom menu, and as you
dig into the site, there's a 'reverse path' in the top right of the
page, also built by the asp/.dll combo.  Because I'm using the
structure.cnf information on my own, I can tweak things, such as the
product information.  There are only three pages for our products, but
the site 'sees' lots of pages.  The .dll knows if the web page being
displayed is a product page, so it connects to the product database and
'spoofs' the information.  For example,
http://internet/Products/productlist.asp?ProductType=19 to FrontPage is
just productlist.asp.  But the .dll knows it's a page that lists a
'type' of product, so it pulls up the product type name 'Accessories'
and sets the page header info to 'Accessories', so that information
shows up for the title of the page, and in the menus of the site.

 

Anyhow, if this piques anyone's curiosity, give me a holler, I'd be more
then happy to share my vb code for this stuff.

 

Drew