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Password protected page in Front Page

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kmbrooks

Technical User
Aug 2, 2001
5
US
Hi I have a website for the hospital where I work, and they'd like me to add a page that only certain users will be able to access. Can I have a link to that page on my home page, and have it request a password before changing pages?
Thanks for any help!
 
Pages are not password protected. Directories (or sub-webs) are. This may sound like a semantic point but it's something you need to understand to make sense of how to password protect an area.

In FrontPage the way to create a protected space is to create a sub-web with different permissions from the parent web. All pages that are in the sub-web will require a password to be entered before they can be viewed.

FrontPage uses something called htaccess to password protect areas. This is the standard method of protection and it does not allow for a form type of box to be put on a page where the username and password can be entered which is what I think you have in mind when you ask if the page could "ask for the password before changing pages". What you could do is create an interim page letting people know who the area is available to and how to register for a username and password, which brings us to another issue you must consider:

Before constructing your password protected area you have to decide who will be able to access it and by what process they will gain access. Will they need to register for a password with you? If so will you be able (and willing) to handle these requests daily so they are not kept waiting for access? (You will have to add them to your list of users) Perhaps you'll need a note on the registration page letting them know how long they should expect to wait.

You can create a password protected page that uses only one password that is changed monthly. This allows you to just email everyone monthly with the new password rather than adding people daily. It also means that if you want to shut someone out of the protected area you will not be able to do so until the next month without shutting out all of your other users.

Finally, when password protecting an area FrontPage offers no automated way for users to find lost passwords. I have done sites like this and I would not consider doing another one where the users could not automatically retrieve their passwords. (Which can be done using cgi scripts.) They will drive you nuts!

If you need further info on this I have a complete tutorial. Just contact me.

bunni dot com
 
I've been struggling with Front Page Extensions for months. I gave up for a while because we were going to migrate to something other, like Dreamweaver etc. The webmaster has become set in his ways and won't change to something else at this time (or when I get him fired). I have a Red Hat 6.2 Linux box with Apache 1.3.19 (source) that I patched with version 5.0 of the extensions from The compile was successful. Bringing up the site in my browser myurl.com/server-info showed that the extensions were there. I ran the fpinstall.sh and it populated the directories off /usr/local/apache/htdocs with a bunch of _vti_... directories. When I try to use Front Page 2000 on my WindowsMe machine to publish to the linux server a login box comes up stating "operation requires author privledges". I had added my name and password (which is encrypted in the _vti_pvt/service.pwd file) via fpsrvadm.exe but when I enter my id and password the box just keeps reappearing after trying for a second or two. I tried going into all the directories and changing the .htaccess file, there's a line deny from all to allow from all (just to see if this fixed my problem, I'll change it back) but it didn't help. I noticed that I owned the directories where Apache was running under nobody so I chown and chgrp the directories to nobody. The latest was that it could not find /_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc, so I copied the shtml.exe from the /usr/local/frontpage/version4.0/bin directory to the .../htdocs/_vti_bin directory and changed owner and group to nobody and chmod to 644.

This post is getting way too long. I've searched for FP extensions on Linux and tried every suggestion I could find. Can someone point me in the right direction?
 
Well I did find another alternative. We contacted the company that hosts the website, and they had us add a folder within our web folder called Projects. Then they added security to that folder, and I save all the pages I want accessed by password only into that folder. Works pretty slick. Not sure if all web hosting companies will do this, but is worth a shot!
 
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