Friday - The Automatic FAQ Maker
It may seem more natural to use all Mac or All Windows for both the client used to run NetPublish Assistant (NPA) and the web server on which NP runs, but if you don't 'own' the whole system you may not have such a choice. The good news is that NP is designed to run on either of the two supported server OSs without alteration, regardless of the OS on which the client runs. By comparison, in v6 PortWeb the path to the portweb.dll different from Mac/Win requiring every PortWeb call to be edited if working cross-OS. So the NP approach is good news. Perhaps the least intuitive - as Mac web servers are less common - is using Mac based NP hosting when you are a Windows-based Portfolio user. Don't worry it works.
It gets better. Say you've spent ages customising a set of templates in NPA and have them saved on your system (see here to find out where in each OS). You're on a PC but you want to give copy to your partner whose Mac-based. No problem, simply find the location of the folder with your saved template set's name and copy - or zip- the folder and all its contents to the appropriate location on the Mac. So to flesh out the example, let's assume your project is called 'Family' and you're the PC-based user. So you find the folder "C:\My Documents\Extensis\Portfolio\NetPublish\User Data\sites\web\Family" and copy or zip the contents of the family folder. Now email or pass the files to your Mac-based partner. They open folder "~/Documents/Portfolio/NetPublish/User Data/sites/web/" and copy/unzip the Family folder there so that they now have a folder "~/Documents/Portfolio/NetPublish/User Data/sites/web/Family" with all the template information in the Family folder. It's that simple!
You can use this technique with template sets for both web or static NP output. Note you can't use web templates for static pages or vice versa. The locations to use are:
NP uses JavaScript for its server-side language which works equally well with either OS. On the client-side - i.e. code run in your browser, things are as a present with JS handling depending on the individual browser brand and version. Note Netscape 4 - still around on a number of old Macs, can't handle IFrames which are used by nearly all the NP templates.
Question: Can client and NP hosts be a different OS? [FAQ00365.htm]
Last Update:- 31 May 2006
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