Sadly, this is an oft-asked and answered question. Sadly, because the
answer is you really must re-build the site in order to take
advantage of Freeway’s power and flexibility. As you have seen, the
HTML import is something of a weak leg.
The reason for this is that Freeway does not understand HTML, except
in a sort of idiot-savant way. Imagine someone who could ramble on in
perfect Iambic pentameter the most heart-wrenchingly beautiful
poetry, but did not understand a single spoken work – even their own.
Freeway’s internal design model is much richer and deeper than HTML
+CSS (a shockingly basic language) can even express. Every publish
cycle is a process (within Freeway) of “dumbing down” this model into
something that a browser can understand. The beauty of this
separation of Church and State is that you can (in Pro) output the
same design as HTML 3.2, HTML 4, or XHTML – all without changing
anything in your design. But the Achilles heel of this setup is that
when you import HTML – even HTML generated by Freeway itself – the
results are likely similar to but rarely the same as what you would
see of that code in a browser.
I feel your pain, and we’ve all been there from time to time. There’s
a few different things you can do. One would be to take a look at the
changes you’ve been requested to perform. If they are simple text
changes in the body of an existing page, then get yourself a good
(free) text editor like TextWrangler[1] and open up the offending
pages there. Search for a line of text that’s near the part you need
to change, and once you’ve found the neighborhood, make the changes.
Don’t forget to encode your apostrophes and quotation marks and
ampersands – that’s about all you need to remember there.
Left Quote: “
Right Quote: ”
Apostrophe or Right Single Quote: ’
Left Single Quote: ‘
Ampersand: &
If the changes are more ambitious, such as new pages, then you would
do well to follow these instructions: <Docs - Softpress Talk
questions/40/Fast+Way+to+Recreate+a+Website>. You won’t need to do
everything it says (although you could get ambitious and do so
anyway) but you could duplicate an existing page using this technique
and then use it as a Master Page (template) later when you’re called
on to add more pages.
What you would do then is make sure that you name the new Freeway-
generated file in a way that does not overlap any of the existing
pages, and then you would also have to link this page from the
existing pages. Depending on how they are constructed, this may or
may not be simple. (If the existing site uses include files for
navigation, then you will only have to make this change in one place.
Otherwise, you will need to fire up your text editor on every single
page in the existing site. At which point you may start to think,
‘Hey, I should really get the rest of the site into Freeway!’)
All of this piece-meal technique is going to make you very familiar
with an FTP application (for moving files to the server) and with
HTML itself, both of which are valuable skills if you don’t already
have them.
But in the end, you’ll probably start a new site in Freeway, and
after a short while feel like someone bolted a surplus JATO bottle to
the roof of your car.
Walter
On Oct 21, 2008, at 7:35 AM, Manfred Raida wrote:
Hi,
I hope I do not ask an already answered question: I inherited an
old website html and phb files and have to modify it and update it.
It can be downloaded on the computer, but opening in Freeway it
looks strange and many parts are missing, I tried to copy the html
text over, no success. Is there a way to get such a website into
Freeway to work with it?
Thanks a lot
Manfred
Sinagpore
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