FrontPage is a tool.  At a very fundamental level it is nothing more than a glorified Notepad - open file, save file.  As such, any tool whether it is FrontPage, Notepad or a custom editor will experience the same ghosting/unghosting behavior.

This statement makes me feel quite ill. 

 

Have you PERSONALLY confirmed that it notepad infact does unghost your files?

Yes - on a regular basis for the past 3 years. :)

 

The GhostHunter web part will confirm this for you as well.

 

You shouldn't feel ill, though.  The point of my post was to show that the editors do what they need to do - open and save.  SharePoint provides the api's that allow any editor to accomplish those tasks. 

 

For example, Notepad relies on webdav to retrieve the file and uses webdav to save the file.  FrontPage uses the WebPart Pages web service (webpartpages.asmx) to retrieve the file and uses the FP RPCs to save the file.

 

When it comes to aspx pages, SharePoint will appropriately transition a ghosted page to an unghosted state once a modification is made.

 

 

It's certainly true that other tools can affect ghosting.  But isn't the real point that Microsoft's tool which they promote as the premier Sharepoint editor  be more intelligent ? 

No.  If anyone is going to be more intelligent, it has to be SharePoint  - the lowest common denominator in all situations is the core product.

I have a "please help me I am stuck" issue!!!

 

This isn't the place for it really... but I am sorry I couldn't figure out where else to put it.

 

I have done the success story listed in Connell's blog (and GhostHunter is great... I love it!) but I have run into a problem that I can't seem to find a solution for.

 

On my sites that have been 'reghosted' by using the GH web part, any changes to the ONET.xml file do not show in the newly reghosted sites.  Others sites in the same server farm that were never unghosted show the ONET.xml changes just fine, so I don't think it is anything I am doing wrong in the onet file (what I am doing is removing the site settings link).

 

Do you have any idea why onet.xml file changes are not showing in the reghosted sites? I have restarted IIS...

 

Any help would be dearly appreciated.

Thanks for the mention Maurice.  I couldn't agree more with your statement that it's the underlying technology and not FrontPage.  However, my biggest concern, which I blogged about (inspired by Barry Kouda's article "What you Don't Know About FP2003 Can Hurt You") is that users of FrontPage don't realize exactly the implications of what they are doing

 

Case in point: My company has been working with SharePoint for about 12 months now.  My group is now fairly seasoned in the capabilities & limitations of the product.  We've adopted policies that basically say "do everything you can to stay ghosted... if you need a custom look & feel that can't be accomplished via CSS & images, first method is to create a template just for you." Why?  Well, let's just say our company has gone through enough acquisitions where we've had to rebrand our stuff that we need to be forward looking.  We have built numerous sites for internal customers.  Then someone whose read about the product wants to open their site in FrontPage and make changes at will.

Possible?  Sure!  In fact they can do a TON on their own.  BUT, they don't know the implications of it.  It's one of those things that I strongly believe that Microsoft should REALLY hammer home.  Why is it that us bloggers are the only ones really pushing the "ghosting/unghosting" issue?  I didn't see an article on MSDN until I saw tons of ours.

 

So... what's my biggest issue: The seperation of the presentation & data.  We achive this by keeping the presentation in the site def's (templates) and the data in the database.  But when the presentation moves into the database (unghosted), we get into problems.  When you host sites for customers who require solid change management processes, this model (unghosted pages) causes problems... BIG problems.

I frankly don't understand how we just took a step back in merging the presentation & data.  Didn't we just start using code behind files, data grids, user controls, server controls... need I name more?  That was supposed to keep seperation easier... and it does... but SharePoint took a big step back. 

 

But it's not really possible (heard that from two MS people... one MVP, one consultant)!  Oh yeah?  See: Microsoft's Content Management Server... that's a near-PERFECT implementation of the seperation of data & presentation!  And it's two years old!  "But you have to develop all your own templates!"  Really?  Doesn't it seem more like "here are X site definition projects (templates) we've already provided for you... you can build your own".  "But SharePoint already does that"... yeah, kinda... but, still no seperation of presentation and data.

 

<breathe> I'm done... stepping off my soapbox <breathe>

Maurice-

 

I posted about my onet.xml problem on the newsgroup and I got this for a reply:

 

 

Wanted to see if you had any feedback based off what Mike was saying.

 

Thank you

Heather,

 

I haven't really had a chance to look into your problem, but I wanted to point out a couple of things...

Hope this helps in the interim,

-Maurice

 

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There is no way to reset the navbar unless you manually do it yourself via FP2003.  Otherwise, the only way to "reset" is to recreate your site with the desired onet.xml changes in place before the site is created.