Ready to Run Software Inc. the company who has brought MS FrontPage 2002 server extensions to the unix platform for the past many years has announced that Microsoft has ended support for the product as of June 30, 2006.
http://www.rtr.com/fpsupport/bugrep2000.htm
What does this mean to people on Unix/Linux based web server?
Barring an announcement by cPanel.net that they will somehow continue providing security updates, in the near future FrontPage server extensions will no longer be available. cPanel has made no public remarks on this matter that I know of but other major control panel developers have announced that they will soon not include FP server extension in their product.
Page-Zone and every other Linux based hosting company who provides the extensions to end users will likely keep them running on the servers until security becomes an issue. That could be tomorrow, or it could be a year from now. Page-Zone is in a good position right now on FP security, and we have no reason to remove the frontpage module but a new exploit could be discovered and announced at any time causing us to remove the module because there will be no future patches provided by Ready to Run Software Inc. or Microsoft.
It should be noted that this in no way affects anyones ability to use FrontPage to build their site. It will affect the ability to use some of the components such as page counter and discussion groups, both of which we already offer in a much better solution through the cPanel control panel.
Websites which depend on FrontPage server extensions for shared borders and themes to render a page should be published locally and uploaded via FTP in order to get the effect of the shared borders and themes on the site. As opposed up publishing and letting the server insert the shared borders, which won't happen if the frontpage module is not installed on the server.
Websites which depend on shared borders and themes can still be published and will render properly by using the ftp method built into FrontPage, they will just not be built by the server as they are called up, which really makes no difference to the viewer except maybe they will get a quicker loading site, which is better anyway. See screenshots for the two step method.
Note - Websites which were designed on the server using FrontPage as opposed to designed locally and published via ftp will lose themes and shared borders the moment extensions are no longer available! To prevent this from happening the site should be imported now using the - File |Import |From Site - tool in FrontPage to download the site to your computer and re-published to a local folder on your computer so that FrontPage will save the look of the site as it should appear.