Installing Custom FrontPage Components

All custom components are installed on the server. No client-side installation is required.

Web server administrators have two options when installing new custom components:

Make them available to all web servers on a machine.
Make them available to only one web server on a machine.

To make custom components available to all web servers on a machine, the components should be installed in the

FrontPageRoot/bots

directory, where FrontPageRoot
is

c:\Program Files\Microsoft FrontPage

by default for Windows 95 and Windows NT, or

/usr/local/frontpage

by default for UNIX. These components can be used in any FrontPage web hosted by that machine. The sample program "fproot" demonstrates how you can determine where custom components should be installed for any version of FrontPage.

To make custom components available to just one web server on a machine, the components should be installed in

content/_vti_bot

directory, where content
is the Root Web’s content directory for the chosen web server. These components can be used in the Root Web and all of its sub-webs.

In the case of conflicts (duplicate custom components in the machine and server directories), the custom components in the server directory take precedence.

Note: After installing a custom FrontPage component (such as the Electronic Commerce Wizard), the root web needs to have a Recalculate Hyperlinks operation performed by a root web author or administrator before the component is made available. Only after this operation is performed will the newly-installed custom component appear in the Insert FrontPage Component dialog box in FrontPage. This behavior was added in FrontPage 98 as a security measure; in prior versions, recalculating any FrontPage web was sufficient.