December, 2009

Update to this blog post – this offer is extended through Jan 31, 2010!

For a limited time there is a discount of 30% on all Microsoft Expression version 3 products (Microsoft Expression Studio + Expression Web, both full and upgrade versions) when purchased through the Microsoft Online Store. A special promo code is NOT required and this is available only in the *US*. This offer is valid through December 28, 2009 11:59 p.m. Check it out:

http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Expression-Web-3-Full/product/7AD09DC1

A few months ago, I went to Paul, who is one of our Lead Developer to suggest, what I thought is a great new feature, that we should enable our users to register their own Site Templates so that they will be available on the New Site dialog.Then Paul kindly told me that I can do that today. I was pleasantly surprised. But when he patiently walked me through the process, I thought "How would anyone, like me, know how to do this without any instruction?".

After doing some searches online, I noticed that some of you already figured this out. But for others I hope these insights help. It requires you to do many steps manually and you have to have administrator rights to your machine. Hopefully, in future versions of Expression Web, we are able to improve the experience.

So here it is:

The Site templates shipped with Expression Web can be found in a folder like this, depending where it is installed. C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Web 3\en\WEBS. Out of the box, the folder has the following contents.

Here's an example contents of a template (*.tem) folder:

 

Here's the contents of the ORG1.INF file:

So, here's the workflow to register your custom Site Templates in Expression Web 1, 2 or 3:

1. Create a folder in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Expression\Web 3\en\WEBS folder for your template. Your folder must have a suffix ".tem" for template.
2. Drop the files for your Site template into the folder you just created. The file structure should be flat and should have any sub-folder.
3. Note that the image files will be created inside a sub-folder named "Images" when a Site is created based on your template so adjust the code for your files accordingly.
4. Create an INF file using notepad or other program with the format like the above ORG1.INF example.
5. Specify the template name, description and the thumbnail image to display on the New Site Dialog.
6. List out all the files in your Site template and for each file, specify its destination folder.
7. If your Site template is in a language other than US English, you can also change the LCID from 1033 (for en-us) to the appropriate Language ID. See LCID chart on MSDN.
8. Take a screen capture of the home page of your template Site and save it in this folder as well. This image will be use as the preview thumbnail for your Site template in the New Site dialog. Specify the name of this image in the preview field in the INF file as well.
   

To test this out, I added a Site template I downloaded from Zen Garden and here's how my New Site dialog looks like:

Sayuri Wijaya Gould
sayuriw@microsoft.com
Expression Web Program Manager

Last month we blogged about a Firefox bug our customers encountered using SuperPreview with Firefox version 3.5.5. This bug caused Firefox 3.5 to stop working with SuperPreview on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. With the newest release of Firefox 3.5.6, the Mozilla team has fixed the aforementioned bug. We recommend that you update to this latest version of Firefox 3.5 to use it again in SuperPreview. If you followed the steps in the previous blog post to revert to an earlier version of Firefox, you may now turn auto-updates back on.

Michelle Rosenthal
Microsoft Expression Web

Raena Jackson Armitage , SitePoint Community Leader and hand-coder, recently checked out the code editor and PHP support in Expression Web 3 and wrote up a review of her experience:

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/expression-web-3-php