About web server publishing

Netscape Web Publisher is a Java applet that runs on your local desktop and interacts with files managed by a Netscape Enterprise Server. With Web Publisher, you can directly access, edit, and manage documents stored on remote servers. Members of workgroups can seamlessly collaborate on project content from their desktops. Web Publisher allows you to publish a document to the appropriate web server with the click of a button, without using ftp commands or other complex interfaces.

Web Publisher provides server users with these capabilities from their desktops:

This chapter introduces these features of Web Publisher and provides an overview of web server publishing.

File management

Netscape Web Publisher allows you to manage remote server files and folders. You have easy access to the server's files and folders through a hierarchical list in the Web Publisher file management window. You can copy, move, rename, and delete files and directories. You can also download server files to your local system and upload your local files to the server.

Each file and folder on the server has a set of properties that describe information about a file such as its filename, owner, lock status, size, and creation date, and this information is updated whenever the file is edited or added to the server.

You can perform a search on any of these file properties. For example, you can search for all files that belong to a certain author, for all the locked files, or for any file with a particular string in the title field.

Version control

Netscape Web Publisher includes a version control system for keeping track of documents as they are updated and changed. Once version control is started for a document, Web Publisher manages its version control for you, providing its version history, allowing you to compare different versions, and automatically incrementing its version numbers when users publish new versions.

You can place a file under version control by manually starting version control for any file listed in the Web Publisher file management window. You can also direct Web Publisher to automatically start versioning for a file by setting an option when you edit the file or when you upload a local file to the server.

The latest version of a file is the one that is available "live" on the web server, but you still have access to previous versions by using Web Publisher in these ways:

Editing and publishing

With Web Publisher, you can edit server files in a variety of different formats, automatically launching the application associated with the file, such as Netscape Composer for HTML files, Adobe Acrobat for PDF files, and Microsoft Excel for spreadsheet files.

You can configure Web Publisher to associate an editor program with a specific file type. For example, if you edit an HTML file or an ASCII file, Web Publisher defaults to opening the file in a Netscape HTML editor. If you edit a non-HTML file, Web Publisher launches the application associated with that file type. For example, if Microsoft Excel is associated with files that use the .xls extension, when you edit such files, Microsoft Excel is launched and you can work in Excel, saving the file as usual when you are done making changes.

When you edit a server file, Web Publisher places a small pen icon next to it in the Web Publisher applet window. During the edit, the file is in an "edit state," which locks it so that other users cannot write to it, although they can still browse it. To make your new changes publicly available to other users on the server, you must publish the edited file back to the server. This updates the server file and makes it available to other users again.

As part of the process of publishing an edited file back to the web server, Web Publisher performs these tasks:

Search

With Netscape Web Publisher, you can search through the contents and file properties of documents on a remote server. For example, you can search for documents created after a certain date or for documents that contain the word web.

For more information about the Web Publisher search function, see Chapter 5, "Search."

Agent services

With Netscape Web Publisher, you can create server agents that can perform actions automatically for you. In some situations, you may want the Enterprise Server to perform a task without requiring you to interact directly with the server. For example, you may want to get an email every week listing the most recently updated web pages without having to start your browser, access the server, and perform a search.

There are two basic types of events that agents respond to:

For more information about agent services, see Chapter 6, "Agents."

Controlling access

Netscape Web Publisher lets you control access to your Web Publisher files and folders. You can permit different users to have different types of access to your files and folders (for example, allowing one user only to read files, while another user can write or delete your files). You can define which documents an agent can monitor and you can restrict which documents you can search through.

For more information about setting access permissions, see Chapter 7, "Access control."

Link management

Netscape Web Publisher provides automatic link management functions for you. Whenever you upload or publish a document, Web Publisher checks its links and updates the information in the link status database. Depending on how your server administrator sets up your server, when you copy, move, or rename files or folders, Web Publisher updates outgoing and incoming links between files on the same server so that the links still point to the same documents.

For more information about link management, see Chapter 8, "Managing links."