Web Site Publisher

Future Enhancements

Web Site Publisher is a free tool for publishing a web site to the web. Future enhancements planned or suggested but not incorporated in the current release include:

• Add option to preview files to be uploaded or deleted before actually processing them. (Idea submitted independently by WebAttack and Maurizio Alberti.)
• Capability to inform the program that the web site and local version are identical (so no upload necessary but still allowing all future changes to be uploaded). This would be useful when configuring a new web site which has already been uploaded - either using Web Site Publisher after a reinstall of Windows or when switching over from another tool. (Idea submitted by Jean-Francois Magni.)
• Allow for a setting for confirm before deletion, "so newbies don't make stupid errors". (Idea submitted by Joe Mosca.)
• Ability to specify a "default" web site (other than simply the first in the list). This would allow the default web site to be published purely by clicking "Publish" rather than first selecting/highlighting it and then publishing.
• Ability to change the order in which web sites are published.
• On-line help.
• Connection logic to be migrated into a separate thread from the main process (all the copy logic is already maintained in a separate thread). This would remove the period when the tool seems unresponsive when it first makes a connection.
• Multiple connections to use when updating a web site. Since the performance bottleneck is typically a combination of bandwidth and the server (i.e. waiting for the server to respond), maintaining and using two or more connections could reduce the total time (by making better use of the available bandwidth).
• Allow publication of more than one web site simultaneously rather than one at a time.
• Translation into other languages. Possibly using an external file to hold the translations thereby making it easier to translate into other languages.
• Add the ability to schedule a website to be published at a particular time. This would be useful if factors meant that a website could only be updated at night - useful for php and asp sites for which updating files could disrupt session information.
• Create a simple text-file in the root (or other folder) with the date and time last published. This would allow server side scripting (such as php) to know when the site was last updated. (Idea submitted by Christopher Hauser.)
• Add option to password protect the configuration. So someone with more experience can configure Web Site Publisher for a someone without fear that they could fiddle with the configuration and break something. (Idea submitted by Dominique.)
• Add an estimate of the time required to update a website. (Idea submitted by Safro Kwame.)
• Support publishing across SFTP.
• Allow (Windows) hidden files and folders to be ignored.
• Luc De Wilde has suggested not copying hidden files.
• By popular request: The ability to copy down from an ftp server (allowing you to pick up changes that others may have made) - so a bit like publishing in reverse!
• On the website properties page to separate out the FTP server and directory into separate fields rather than the current view as a single combined field. (Idea submitted by Paul Ross.)
• Option to keep a connection open so that if you are editing your files and then pushing them up, the connection is kept open (subject to any timeouts at the server end) so to avoid the overhead of reconnecting to publish changes. This would be of benefit to those who make changes locally, push them up, teak files, push them up rather than those who might only push up one update every few days. (Idea submitted by Paul Ross.)
• Rudy Zwarg has suggested the option to choose between publishing not just one selected or all (as at present) but also a group of selected websites - i.e. the creation of publishing jobs.
• Peter Freund has suggested the option to allow the program to publish-all when run (so it does a publish-all when started).
• Peter Freund has suggested allowing the program to exit automatically after publishing completes.
• Peter Freund has suggested the option to suppress error and status messages (i.e. the dialog boxes) during publishing.
• Dave Abbott has suggested including an option to log why files are not copied - this would be complementary to the existing option to log why files are copied.

Please e-mail other ideas and requests for future enhancement to support@cryer.co.uk.