Ecommerce Template Back End

[QHF]

A friend that is a small business owner is looking for a new hosting company (I'm recommending GlowHost). He wants to totally rebuild his on-line store and shopping cart. He uses FrontPage 2003, (not my first choice but he likes it and feels comfortable with it). He has been on-line and has found an ecommerce template designed for FrontPage that he feels will meet his needs.

I'm recommending he purchase your Professional 4 Star plan as performance, backups, uptime and support are his main concerns. His current host is only providing a shared SSL certificate and very spotty support. He wants his on-line store to have a dedicated IP and private SSL certificate which the above plan provides at fewer dollars than he's paying for the shared SSL and shared IP address.

Now, he hasn't purchased it yet, but I have looked at the template specs and it's .asp. It has a built in database for the on-line store but it's in Access .mdb format. The documentation says to ask the hosting company if there is a special folder where the database should reside. The default folder in the template file structure is called fpdb and is under the root of the new store. It needs write permissions but be non-browseable. Question: does GlowHost allow connecting to an Access DB residing on your servers? Is it possible? Would you recommend it?

They do have a PHP version for FrontPage but he doesn't considers PHP real FrontPage, and that is all he wants. We all have our crosses to bear, but sometimes I wonder, why I' nailed to mine!

I'll be happy to provide any additional information.

Thanks!

[Matt]

ASP and Access will not work, he would need to use PHP and MySQl instead or find a host that offers Windows hosting.

What do you mean by "he doesn't considers PHP real FrontPage?"

[QHF]

What do you mean by "he doesn't considers PHP real FrontPage?"

As far as he is concerned, anything other than FrontPage is unnecessary, it does everything he wanted (until now). I have shown him many examples of other side builders including Dream Weaver and Expressions Web, which I explained is the Microsoft replacement for FrontPage plus some CMS PHP solutions, but he is of the opinion that if its not broke, why try to fix it.

He has looked up the cost and says he can't justify the price for the Adobe or Microsoft software. I even showed him some free PHP site builders and explained the template builder is is considering makes both an .asp and a PHP version, but he defiantly wants to stay in his comfort zone.

Another option is for me or GlowHost (charging whatever you charge) to set everything up so it is a turn key solution all he would have to do is the administration though CPanel and the admin portion of the template for his store.

[Matt]

Well, AFAIK Frontpage 2003 and any other editor will support .php it should appear to him as virtually the same thing as the .asp pages. The main difference would be in the source code and possible some minor cosmetics or functionality differences, but from the design standpoint, i do not see why asp or php would be any different to him but then maybe I still am misunderstanding. Here is a little tutorial I found.

Using PHP with Frontpage 2003 -http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/fr...092991033.aspx