Freeway Site Management

Freeway
1

Greetings all…

Since Freeway does not offer a publish boolean for folders & pages (major feature request here), I am exploring other workflows and am curious if there might be any issues with the following:

What is needed is a way to implement changes periodically to “part” of the site (directory A for instance) without affecting the rest of the site, and allowing us to continue development in other areas of the site.

So the plan is to create separate site documents by duplicating the original site document, and deleting all but the files we wish to update, and deleting the files that remain in the new document from the original document.

Consider a golf course that changes their fees, hours, and events 4 or 5 times a year. All of these pages are currently in a “Rates” directory in the main site document. I’d like to make a duplicate of the main site document, and delete all but the “rates” directory (and enclosed pages) from it, and then delete the “rates” directory from the main document.

Now I would have a site file for everything but the rates pages, and I could duplicate the “rates only” site document as many times as needed for the regular seasonal changes (say 4 of them, one each for Spring, Summer, Fall, & Winter). Than it is simply a matter of opening the correct rates site file for the current season and doing an upload, hence updating the rates pages without affecting the rest of the site.

I am under the impression that under this scenario, Freeway will not touch (read DELETE) any files on the publish server that are not referenced in the current site document provided there are no file path conflicts; i.e. opening the main site document (the one with no rates directory) and doing an upload will not affect the “rates” directory on the server. Is this a correct assumption?

If so, I have another concern. Imagine we now have 4 Freeway site documents for the seasonal rates. Summer rates have gone up since the last upload so we modify the pages in this site document and do an upload.

Fall now arrives and we need to open the Fall site document and upload those pages; but those pages have not changed since last year so the files are older than the Summer rates we last uploaded. How does Freeway handle this? Does it take modified dates into consideration? Or does it simply upload all files that have differences between the publish server and the site document? Or is there yet another criteria it uses that I may not be considering?

And finally, is there a better way to manage this than the above scenario.

TIA for your input on this rather convoluted issue.

-ss

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2

You have the right idea here. Basically, you make one Freeway document that publishes mostly empty folders. Then you make additional Freeway documents that publish INTO those folders.

If you search the KnowledgeBase for the term “splitting” as in “splitting a site”, you will see plenty of discussion of that concept. Ditto on this list, if you visit the Web version: http://freewaytalk.net

Freeway will never overwrite anything that it didn’t make itself. So when you come to making changes to one of the folders, you will want to manually empty the relevant folder, then upload the newer version.

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3

Sometime around 22/5/08 (at 13:41 -0400) waltd said:

Freeway will never overwrite anything that it didn’t make itself. So
when you come to making changes to one of the folders, you will want
to manually empty the relevant folder, then upload the newer version.

Hang on, Freeway can overwrite stuff it didn’t make itself, can’t
it? If I upload a site to the web root of somewhere that already has
an index.html file, my index.html page that is made by and uploaded
from my Freeway document will overwrite the original, wherever it
came from…

Anyway, when splitting a site document into multiple ones I generally
delete individual folders from document duplicates, so each document
ends up responsible for and containing the folder that contains its
content. That’s rather than having one doc with folders and others
that publish into those folders. That’s just my general approach, it
works either way.

The first time a document that’s had content deleted is uploaded it
will REMOVE the deleted stuff it sees on the server. So you may need
to upload from one, then upload from the other, then upload from the
first again - to make sure that each has stopped trying to tidy up
stuff that’s now managed by a different document.

k

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4

Yes, I Freeway will overwrite anything that exists at a destination path on the publish server that the site document contains a file for. It will also delete any files on the publish site that have been deleted from the publishing site file.

I have chosen the “empty folder in site/subsite to publish to said empty folder” method, predominantly to have a reminder in the site (I label that folder a special color) that there is a subsite, and it seems to work well.

Initially, publishing the empty folder in the main site will delete all files in that directory on the server. Once this is done (and the empty folder in the main site is no longer touched using that document), no further changes will be made to that folder when publishing from the site file.

It was interesting to note that the site splitting tutorial referenced performance issues with large sites as one reason for splitting. I am curious as to just what kinds of numbers we are talking about here.

I remember back in the semi-old Mac II days, having illustrator files with thousands of paths. Tweaking one path would require a document wide redraw (which could take minutes). Hopefully Freeway’s object caching model is far more efficient (c;

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5

Sometime around 23/5/08 (at 14:18 -0400) Solutions Etcetera said:

It was interesting to note that the site splitting tutorial
referenced performance issues with large sites as one reason for
splitting. I am curious as to just what kinds of numbers we are
talking about here.

Hard to say, really. This issue is less of a problem now, with more
recent versions of Freeway and with faster iron to run it on. One
thing that could drag it down somewhat was importing lots of very
large (as in print-res large) original images.

I remember back in the semi-old Mac II days, having illustrator
files with thousands of paths. Tweaking one path would require a
document wide redraw (which could take minutes).

Oh boy. I remember trying to set very large text in FreeHand 1 - and
waiting minutes at best for each redraw. Ouch.
Anyway, shouldn’t you have been using Superpaint back then? :wink:

k

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6

We needed EPS for separations… plus it was the only language that the imagesetter which burned the silkscreens understood.

-ss

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7

For some time I have been interested in an easy to use and
inexpensive slideshow function in Freeway. This forum has previously
been helpful in my enquiries.
I bought SlideShowPro but found the extra software such as Flash was
too expensive and too complicated for the beginner.
Freeway Pro 5, which I haven’t upgraded to yet, seems to have a
limited slideshow function - it appears to be triggered as a page
action. I suppose there would be a workaround whereby the user was
taken to another page and then taken back to the slideshow page
without knowing it, thereby reactivating the slideshow.
I’d just some feedback regarding current slideshow plugins for
Freeway. I’d especially like a slideshow which could be run at the
click of a button, rather than one which is triggered by navigating
to a particular page.
I’d appreciate any thoughts.
Best wishes
Philip Lock

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8

In my experience, by the time you get to a size that will bog Freeway
down, you are in the hundreds of pages, and you should really be
looking at a content management solution, not a static site.

Walter

On May 25, 2008, at 7:56 PM, Keith Martin wrote:

It was interesting to note that the site splitting tutorial
referenced performance issues with large sites as one reason for
splitting. I am curious as to just what kinds of numbers we are
talking about here.

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9

Weaver has a nice Slideshow action, you can take a look at <http://
coastalrugs.com/Actions>

Walter

On May 25, 2008, at 8:49 PM, Philip Lock wrote:

For some time I have been interested in an easy to use and
inexpensive slideshow function in Freeway. This forum has previously
been helpful in my enquiries.

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10

Thanks for the tip Walter. To the novice this looks pretty heavy
duty, but happy to give it a go. Is following the DD instructions
sufficient to install the fading slideshow into Freeway or do I need
to do something with Freeway Actions.
Thanks
Philip Lock

Weaver has a nice Slideshow action, you can take a look at <http://
coastalrugs.com/Actions>

Walter

On May 25, 2008, at 8:49 PM, Philip Lock wrote:

For some time I have been interested in an easy to use and
inexpensive slideshow function in Freeway. This forum has previously
been helpful in my enquiries.

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11

I find the larger the site, the larger the resources folder. With many items in a single resource folder there are times when updating a site, Freeway’s FTP functions just “time out”, and fail when reading “checking” a large folder prior to uploading/updating it. This when Transmit often steps in.

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12

Weaver’s solution uses a very well-written Action to do everything.
You would follow his instructions, which are pretty clear.

Walter

On May 26, 2008, at 4:30 AM, Philip Lock wrote:

Thanks for the tip Walter. To the novice this looks pretty heavy
duty, but happy to give it a go. Is following the DD instructions
sufficient to install the fading slideshow into Freeway or do I need
to do something with Freeway Actions.

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