copying page source into Freeway Pro 4

Freeway
1

I have a website that I created in MS Front page. But that software is no longer being supported so I have switched over to Freeway.

What I would like to do is to go to my website on the internet, click on view page source, copy the html for each page, and then insert the html so that I can recreate my website quickly.

My website is an online store with hundreds of products, descriptions, pictures, etc that would take quite some time to recreate page by page individually all over again. This page source copy would make it fast and easy.

Is it do-able? How do I do it?

Karen

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

2

That approach is not possible with FW. The only way to have a site that’s fully editable from within FW is to create it in FW. Sorry. For what it’s worth it may not be quite as daunting as it first appears and others here have some useful techniques for streamlining the process, perhaps they’ll check in.

Todd

On Mar 8, 2008, at 10:01 AM, Karen wrote:

What I would like to do is to go to my website on the internet, click on view page source, copy the html for each page, and then insert the html so that I can recreate my website quickly.

My website is an online store with hundreds of products, descriptions, pictures, etc that would take quite some time to recreate page by page individually all over again. This page source copy would make it fast and easy.

Is it do-able? How do I do it?

3

This is not going to work out well if you must retain the original
code. First off, Freeway is an HTML generator, and its native
language is not HTML. Second, Frontpage – particularly the versions
that ran on the Mac – never actually wrote anything remotely like
valid HTML. It would display in IE, but that’s about the limit of
that. Importing broken code will lead to more work than re-creating
the page. I’m not suggesting that Freeway’s HTML import is all that
great, but you are definitely asking for pain trying to import
invalid code.

I know this is not the answer you wanted to hear, but what you need
to do in order to move forward is re-create your site in Freeway,
from scratch. That said, it’s really not as onerous a chore as you
might imagine, and the benefit going forward is that you will be able
to make changes and updates and grow your site very very simply.

I wrote a set of steps many years ago to cover just this issue:

http://www.softpress.com/kb/article.php?id=207

This might also be an opportunity to re-think your catalog. Maybe
there is a content management solution that would help you do this by
making a handful of pages in Freeway, adding Actions to the pages,
and then entering your products in a database. There are a lot of
different ways to do this, and Freeway has a built-in commerce
solution you can use as well. The benefits of a green-field rebuild
of your site are many, and this could save you money going forward or
open you up to new sources of income. Take advantage of this, don’t
look at it as a burden.

Walter

On Mar 8, 2008, at 11:01 AM, Karen wrote:

I have a website that I created in MS Front page. But that software
is no longer being supported so I have switched over to Freeway.

What I would like to do is to go to my website on the internet,
click on view page source, copy the html for each page, and then
insert the html so that I can recreate my website quickly.

My website is an online store with hundreds of products,
descriptions, pictures, etc that would take quite some time to
recreate page by page individually all over again. This page
source copy would make it fast and easy.

Is it do-able? How do I do it?

Karen

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

4

Thank you Todd and Waltd! You are right, its not what I wanted to hear as this is a daunting task that I have been playing with for a week. The thought of all those pages, and products! What about webring codes? I am a member of several web rings and they have their codes that I have to import onto my page… any ideas, thoughts, opinions,???

Karen

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

5

Freeway is an amazing and professional tool for designing and
producing Web sites. There is nothing at all like it on any platform,
which is why it can be such a mind-bender for experienced Web folk to
wrap their heads around.

That said, Freeway Pro makes it very simple and sensible to put code
anywhere you need it. It does this in an object-oriented way, such
that once you extend an object on one page, you can copy and paste
the extended object to place a copy on a different page, and never
have to touch that code twice. In addition, the Actions available
from Softpress and various third-party developers can make great
chunks of what you have already sweated through in source code
completely unnecessary.

Download the Complete Reference PDF, and have a quick study of the
sections on the HTML Markup dialog, Markup Items, and Actions. These
three will be your friends as you put the Web-ring code into your
site. Remember, the more of these common elements that you put onto
your Master Pages, the less repetition you will have to slog through.

One way to get more focused advice would be to post a link to your
current site, and then set up a separate server with the new Freeway
site, so you can show the A/B of what you have and what you are
trying to accomplish in Freeway.

If your hosting provider allows you to make subdomains on your
domain, then set up http://fw.yourserver.com next to http://
www.yourserver.com and start publishing your Freeway experiments into
a clean new server. Once you have everything you need duplicated, you
can switch the folder names on your server and the new site will pop
into existence for the rest of the world, just like magic.

Walter

On Mar 8, 2008, at 11:47 AM, Karen wrote:

Thank you Todd and Waltd! You are right, its not what I wanted to
hear as this is a daunting task that I have been playing with for a
week. The thought of all those pages, and products! What about
webring codes? I am a member of several web rings and they have
their codes that I have to import onto my page… any ideas,
thoughts, opinions,???

Karen

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

6

If you have a list of the products on your own computer as a spreadsheet or in a database, then I recomend to consider the combination of Freeway, Joe Muscara’s EE-tags action and Expression Engine.
Why?
I found in the forum of EE a methode of importing data (TAB separated textfile) as separate entrees in EE. (read separate webpages) In my case it helped to import my complete customerdatabase with jobs I did for them into the website. That was 250 separate records with numerous fields. They are now 250 webpages, so to speak.

The whole process took about 3 seconds. Preparation took half a day. I do hope this helps.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

7

Thank you atelier. Gosh, that sounds impressive! But I am not a tech guru so I have no idea what you said! LOL I am recreating my website from scratch, doing some tweaking along the way that I should have done years ago… adding new buttons, changing the way it looks, etc. Since I started the process yesterday, I am on my 4th page… so its moving along. I just have a bunch of pics, items to add E-buy buttons, etc… its going to take awhile. But since my website is fine the way it is online, I can take my time to recreate it.

Karen

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options

8

Well, I’m no tech guru as well, far from it… The hardest part in my learning process was to understand the whole concept of a database-based website in the way EE has worked this concept out. (Because there are more solutions avaiable which I investigated) As soon as I understood what that new way of thinking could mean for me, how it could work for me, I was sold.

To give you an idea. If you have typical online store, I guess you have pages for every product right? And these pages have more or less the same looks. Images and buttons on the same spot, etc. One page per product. Well, with EE you would build only one page for the products. Yes, that’s right…one page only. And the “products”, like the image of that item, the price, how many in stock etc are stored not in the page, but in a database on the server. If one of your visitors wants to see the page with product number 123, Expression Engine presents the page filled with image, price etc of product 123. Another visitor wants to see product 456. So the server just spits out the same page, now filled with image of product 456, it’s price etc. At the same time, of course.

Now comes the fun part. Freeway, as mentioned above, is THE tool to make websites. Therefore also the right tool to make the templates for a dynamic system as ExpressionEngine.

Good luck.

freewaytalk mailing list
email@hidden
Update your subscriptions at:
http://freewaytalk.net/person/options