Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer - legacy FTP upload workaround
by Mountain Computers Inc., Publication Date: Sunday, June 2, 2019
View Count: 2627, Keywords: Coffee Cup, Visual Site Designer, FTP Legacy Upload, Workaround, Hashtags: #CoffeeCup #VisualSiteDesigner #FTPLegacyUpload #Workaround
About 15 days ago, one of our best websites done with Coffee Cup Visual Site Designer from circa 2010, which we have updated about ~2 times in the last 9 years; and by the way, has been ranked by google, yahoo and duck duck go, search engine placement as #1 for 9 years running!!
just recently their site had to be updated for some mobility issues and though we could care less, we need the mobile splash screen to meet the first information needs.. phone numbers, logo, services, call to action.. bam!!
So, we knew we could not publish via FTP since most of our hosting servers are running SSL TLS 1.2 as of November 2016, and VSD can't be configured to connect to such, so we just enabled Microsoft FTP on our development workstation, and published the content to the local c:\inetpub\ftproot and then used FileZilla to upload the published content.
Nice work around.
1. launch VSD
2. make modifications
3. publish to local FTP server (just set the service to running while in manual status, to enable, just task manager|services|ftp start, then when done, just stop service).
4. with Filezilla, connect from source c:\inetpub\ftproot -> destination SSL TLS 1.2 FTP and publish overwrite
5. check the website and voila..
note 1: for the anonymous to work to the output username, on the ftp target directory, set the permissions to Everyone as Full. otherwise connected or not via cmd ftp open local 127.0.0.1 or your static local ipv4 address, and access denied. simple ls commands will work or not. get familiar with cmd ftp if not already.
note 2: if Filezilla you have to edit the source output index.html VSD main page and fix the first line of content outdated legacy code and just have the normal < ! DOCTYPE html> instead of the older DTD 4.1 version. also remove the meta tags for generator, etc.. and just have your inserted html code stand alone below. the title tag should have the phone number within the first 25 characters, and the description and keywords remain the same. update the seo search engine code if you have to.
For many who have had Visual Site Designer in their toolset, the HTML Editor by Coffee Cup works great too, just the preview sort of hangs and sucks from time to time. Other than that, Coffee Cup has been a great go to company for good tools like this.
Coffee Cup like now WIX was pretty good a WYSIWYG GUI html design and deployment. yes, we tried Responsive Site Designer (RSD) too a few years back and could not get there, so we opted for their HTML Editor, we like that and have 10 clients on that. we Bootstrapped 5 of them that really needed it. the rest are fully functional custom developments that are really desktop targeted.
300 hundred other clients we are supporting we still use whatever CMS platform they choose, but the SEO still sucks for them because of the competition and search engine chaos in ads versus generic properly crafted meta tags and content, etc. I believe the search engines due to privacy issues will collapse eventually and we will have a publicly generic version sooner than later that has no privacy issues.
more to come...
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