An overview of the new publishing features in Expression Web 3
I’ve always been a fan of the television show Frasier. One of my favorite episodes is one where Frasier decides that his dad’s beat-up chair with the duct tape patches is too much of an eyesore for his apartment, so he replaces it with a fancy, leather massage chair. As is typical with most situations regarding Frasier, something goes horribly wrong. His dad hates the new chair, and Frasier ultimately agrees to bring back the tattered original, only to find that it’s been thrown out on the street by the apartment’s maintenance man and taken away.
Frasier’s dad ends up getting his chair back, but it just goes to show you that people don’t really like change, a fact that’s equally true when it comes to software. We don’t mind a few adjustments here and there, especially when workflow improves or we get new features that make things easier on us, but major changes to features we’ve become familiar with are sometimes hard to deal with. It’s no surprise, therefore, that many Expression Web users sometimes find themselves scratching their heads when it comes to publishing in Expression Web 3.
Microsoft invested a significant amount of time revamping the way that publishing works in Expression Web 3. Unlike the scenario with Frasier’s dad and the chair, I think most folks will agree that the new way of doing things is vastly superior to previous versions. However, there are some tasks that seemed easy before (like publishing only changed files) that might not be so intuitive in the new interface. Because of that, I thought it might be a good idea to start off the month with a post about publishing in Expression Web 3.
To kick off publishing in Expression Web 3, you select Publishing from the Site menu. The first time you do this, you’ll need to create a publishing destination by clicking the Add a Publishing Destination link in the middle of the screen. This opens the Connection Settings dialog where you can enter in the settings for your publishing destination as shown in the screenshot below.
Expression Web 3 can store multiple publishing destinations for each of your sites. For example, you might have one publishing destination that points to a test or staging site on a file share and another publishing destination that points to the live site on the Internet. Publishing destinations can be managed by selecting the Publishing Settings menu option on the Site menu. There are also other publishing settings available using this option as shown in the screenshot below.
Once you’ve specified your publishing destination, you’re ready to publish, and the interface for doing that is one that should be familiar to all users of Expression Web. However, there are some significant changes that might not be completely intuitive depending on how you’ve used this interface in previous versions.
In previous versions of Expression Web, a set of radio buttons allowed you to control how publishing took place and you could kick off the publishing process by clicking a Publish Web Site button as shown in the screenshot of Expression Web 2 below.
Expression Web 3’s interface is very similar (shown in the next screenshot), but the radio buttons and Publish Web Site button are missing. In Expression Web 3, publishing is accomplished by dragging and dropping files between the two panes, right-clicking and selecting a publish option from the context menu, or by using the blue arrows between the two panes. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a trick to it. If you have one or more files selected when you publish, only the selected files will be published. If you don’t have any files selected, you can control what gets published using the View dropdown. If you want to publish only changed files, select Changed Files from the view dropdown before you publish.
Some users of Expression Web 3 have reported that as soon as they close and relaunch the application, all files in the site are marked as changed even though nothing has actually changed. Microsoft says that this is problem is caused by leftover information from Expression Web 2 interfering with Expression Web 3’s ability to track changed files. To correct it, you’ll need to do a full publish (publish all files) in Expression Web 3. After doing that, everything should work correctly. If it doesn’t, Microsoft recommends that you delete all of the files in the %APPDATA%MicrosoftExpressionWebsiteCache directory and %APPDATA%MicrosoftExpressionWeb Server Extensions directory. After doing that, do a full publish from Expression Web 3 and you should be fine.
Microsoft is counting on Expression Web 3 to vastly improve your publishing workflow. Once you get used to the new features and interface, I think you’ll agree that publishing is much more robust in Expression Web 3.
