I find the mods needed to use FP with mod_rewrite to be pretty simple and easy to live with. I described them at http://25yearsofprogramming.com/blog/20061231.htm. Once applied, they don't need to be reapplied unless you have to uninstall and reinstall the FP extensions.

If you're really fed up, though...

I believe the answer is yes. The only reason FP gives trouble is because of the FPE's, and Dreamweaver doesn't have those.

To backtrack a bit, if your site is all XHTML and you don't use the FP extensions, then you could just turn them off and continue to publish with FrontPage, except do it in FTP mode, not HTTP. If you turn off the FPE's, you should have NO problems with mod_rewrite, and no mods needed.

If I were looking now, and cost were not a factor, I would go with Dreamweaver CS3.  No, I've never used it, but based on the comments of others it has mostly all positives, and no negatives. 

Expressions Web - negatives: it's geared toward ASP.NET, Sharepoint, and other Microsoft technologies that I do NOT want to be steered toward, while it (I think) ignores PHP and other things that are in the direction I want to go. I don't want to be taken down a road where one day I have to be on a Windows server because I've gotten used to features that they won't support on Linux/Apache.

Seeing as how you are doing only hand coding, though, if I were in your position I'd just keep using FrontPage in FTP mode. It's not a bad text editor. 

There are some other weird possibilities I might look at, too, like Microsoft Visual C++ Express 2005. Yeah, it's a C++ editor, but it's a great text editor, has some tremendous search and replace capabilities, and it's free.

Anyway, you get the idea. When you do hand coding, you have a lot more things to choose from.

At http://support.microsoft.com/kb/281532 is a list of things requiring the FPEs. There are 3 lists, but they cascade, so if you use any features in any of the 3, you need the FPEs. If you don't use those features, "File upload" (which is HTTP publishing) is the only thing you'd need them for, and FTP will eliminate that need.

Forum member Rick_E has posted links to a different and more clear page about what features require the FPEs, but the last I looked, MS has removed that page from the web.


If you search your website code for "webbot" and find nothing, I think you are certainly free of the FPEs.

Even if you find a few webbots, all the ones that act at "author time" don't require the FPE: Include Page webbots and Substitution webbots don't need them. They just insert HTML into the pages when you save the file.

If you find some webbots remaining, post what they are, and I might be able to comment on them.