Well I figure it is about time that I make another post. Back to the subject of the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions. Well I’ve seen way to many customers at Bluehost using things they shouldn’t with the Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions being used on their account. Here is a list of some of the offenders HotLink protection, Password Protect Directories, IP Deny Manager, Leech Protect, anything that uses mod_rewrite (examples would be Joomla & WordPress), & just about anything that thinks about touching the “.htaccess” file(s).
So I ended up leaning some SSH commands to do the cleanup. The only problem is that I have to jump through several hoops to run them. I then found a way to run the commands from inside a PHP file which made it even easier. So now yes I have a php script that cleans out the extensions. (Please note I only developed them to work on Linux servers & I highly doubt they will work on Windows servers.)
I know you might think it a little extreme to delete every last file & folder with the following names, but if you knew how frequently & easily they broke you might understand. The names of the files & folders that get deleted are the following .htaccess, postinfo.html, _vti*, _themes, _private, _overlay, _fpclass, _derived, & _borders. I know this means you have to republish any web, but it does cleanup the server 100% thus if the borders or themes are broken it is coming from your copy of Microsoft FrontPage which is broken, your web is broken, or the configuration file is corrupted.