[Zope] FrontPage Extensions incompatible with Zope?

[Fred Yankowski]

I run a simple Zope-based web site for my local community, and I'm
having trouble supporting authors who want to use FrontPage.  Is there
any good way to use FrontPage with Zope?

This seems an obvious FAQ, but I found little help after a long
search.

There are at least three categories of trouble using FrontPage with
Zope, that I know of:

1) FrontPage generates files and folders whose names start with "_",
   thereby breaking a cardinal Zope naming rule and causing those
   files and folders to be inaccessible (if done via LocalFS) or
   outright impossible (in Zope proper/ZODB).

2) FrontPage uses custom HTTP-based RPCs to do file upload and
   administration.  I know next to nothing about this, but I'm pretty
   sure that Zope does not support this extended HTTP protocol
   directly.  Seems like it could though.

3) FrontPage uses its own library of server-based features, such as
   for counters.

I don't even own a copy of FrontPage, much less have any practical
experience with it, so I'm flying blind here.  But this _has_ to be a
common problem, right?  How have you solved the problem?  (Answers
along the line, "Don't use/allow FrontPage", are not useful to me.)

For those who care about this problem, here's a bit more detail:

The website in question is hosted on an NT4 server, so I've got IIS
available.  I run Apache on port 80, IIS on 82, and Zserver on 8080.
Most stuff for the site is ProxyPass'ed from Apache to Zope.  But I'm
now intercepting the FrontPage-based stuff in Apache and ProxyPass'ing
it to IIS.

I gave the FrontPage-using developer the IIS URL to upload her work,
which is then stored as regular files/folders in NT.  I can use
LocalFS in Zope to access that content, but the leading underscores in
file/folder names cause trouble and the server support for FrontPage
extension features like counters doesn't work, and I can't see how to
make it work from Zope.

-- 
Fred Yankowski           fred@OntoSys.com      tel: +1.630.879.1312
Principal Consultant     www.OntoSys.com       fax: +1.630.879.1370
OntoSys, Inc             38W242 Deerpath Rd, Batavia, IL 60510, USA