Button images published to root folder NOF12

[Ron Reznick]

In NetObjects 12, I have the publish settings to site structure, and am no longer using fly-out menus. Even so, NOF 12 is publishing all button images to the root folder. Is there any way to stop this?

My web server requires that there be less than 1024 files and directories total in any one level, and with all of the buttons being published to the root, it is getting very close to maximum. This is a complex, 6-layer website with 300+ pages.

Can anyone help? I tried getting this answered quite some time ago, but the thread diverged into other things and this issue never got addressed.

Ron Reznick
www.digital-images.net

[gotFusion]

You can change the publish method but you may still go over the limit your web host has set regardless of what you do with that many pages.

Set your publish method to asset type, do a local publish to a different folder and see how that comes out as far as the # of files in any given folder.

If that does not work you can manually customize the publish folders in publish view by dragging and dropping, making new folders, and cut/pasting files.

All of this is a lot of work.

You should first ask your web host if they can upgrade you to an account that does not have such unrealistic limits or find a different host.

[Ron Reznick]

I'm not having a problem with anything besides the buttons. It used to publish buttons in the appropriate directory in NOF8, but now they all go into the root. Other than the buttons, there are not all that many files in the root.

I've not been publishing from Publish View... I've just been using the Publish Site button and either publishing the Entire Site, the Current Page or a selected group of pages from the resulting dialog. I've changed the publish folder in the Publish settings and will try to do a complete site publish from Publish View. By the way, in Publish View, there are few of the buttons listed in the root directory, so maybe that is the answer. I'll report back after the site is published into the new folder.

Ron

[Ron Reznick]

Although it does not show buttons for each page in the root in Publish View, and flyout menus are not active, It still publishes all buttons in the root folder from Publish View. When I check the folders within Publish View, the buttons are located within the folders there, but even after completing an "Entire Site" Publish from Publish View, most of the buttons still display "Never Published" in the Last Local Publish category.

Something is really odd here.

Ron

[RayC]

Did you clean out your Local Publish folder before publishing? NOF will not remove old files.

In NOF 8 the default publish method was to arrange files by Asset Type. In NOF 12 it defaults to by Site Structure. Did you try changing this as suggested? From Publish View, Publish -> Arrange Files -> by Asset Type.

Are you using Custom Button Images for your navigation? I mean, by replacing the images in Design View? I have found that the button images publish to the root directory when doing this.

Publishing from Publish View does nothing different. Publish View gives you the opportunity to change your structure manually by moving files, or to change the "Arrange Files" setting and some other pre-publish settings.

[Ron Reznick]

I published to a separate folder I called "Publish".

This is a six layer website, so I have to use Custom buttons for the deeper layers. That must be the issue (sigh). So I suppose I have a choice of either using the 1st level, parent, current, child navigation scheme or having all buttons publish into the root. I didn't use the custom buttons before NOF12 (the site was five layers at the time, and I just left one layer of buttons out).

Publishing a 300+ page website with nearly 20,000 images in Asset mode is not an option. I would end up with an Assets folder with 20,000 files in it... impossible to maintain efficiently.

I knew about the ability to change file arrangements in Publish View. The option to move files around would be useful in certail situations, but in this case the buttons are auto-publishing into the root folder without showing up in the root in Publish View.

Thanks for letting me know what the cause is. Do you think that the NOF folks will ever address this issue?

Ron

[cougarfood]

It's been some time now, but I had a similar problem.

My solution was to break the site into (3) sites by:
saving the original, functional and happy site, then
stripping the site of the top layers, appropriately confirming the sites' top pages' name, then zipping/exporting the result ( a "chapter II", if you will ). The resultant site was then published under the appropriate Child directory on the server. i.e., \htdocs\<Chapter_II>.

I continued with <chapter III>.

If NOF thinks the root directory is not \htdocs, it will place those buttons in the neuuuw "root" directory of \htdocs\Chapter_II. The same would occur with chapters III through infin-item.

A pain it is to manage a site in multiple chapters, but the loading and manipulation of 100 pages is by-far much faster than manipulating a 300 page/2K-file size site. My upper math skill say you could save at least 14.67% of the load/compilation time using this method.

[Ron Reznick]

There is a thought... I could split the site into the top layer, plus Wildlife, Scenic, Gardens and Art to make a five-section site. Of course, that would require going into each page and making each cross-section link into an external link instead of an internal one. The total time required to alter and re-upload the entire site may offset that 14.67% load time benefit... but as you mentioned it would radically reduce the number of pages the software would have to parse. It can only get worse... by the time I've finished this update there will be close to 30,000 images on the website instead of the current 20,000+.

I'll look into doing this as soon as I complete the current project. Thanks for the suggestion.

Ron

[cougarfood]

Sounds like you can have that all accomplished by the Presidential Election of 2016 - if you get right on that!

Paste your links as "Save" when you change them. Modifying a single line of text in your external links is easier than typing the whole magilla in there again.

If your links are NOF buttons, it's tough. If you create your own and put them in a Layout Region, you can copy/paste into each of the bazillion <chapters> to save effort. Just emulate the button format you've chosen then hard-code their targets, copy/pastie/copy/pastie/copy/pastie and repeat (insert a very large "sigh" HERE) 300 times? Scheesh.

Have you thought about a more simple occupation? Perhaps, chewing glass or Chief Extinguisher of Nuclear Fires? Naked Volcano Cave Skydiver? 30K pages... Ron, you need to rethink your place on this planet or else contract with these folks until your retirement. Have you looked away from the machine in the last couple of years? Your eyesight must surely have degraded. My brain certainly has.

[Ron Reznick]

Well... it's only 350 pages or so at the moment (not 30,000 -- jeez!), but there will be around 30,000 images when I'm done with this update, and closer to 400+ pages.

It's a very large project, entailing reprocessing images using new techniques, post-processing for full-size output and web output, doing all of the research to write detailed captions, captioning and keywording the full-size images and organizing/pricing them for sale... and oh yeah... laying out and writing material for the display website. So far, this particular project has taken 4000+ hours in 16 months. It's been a while since I've done much other than this, plus occasionally eating, sleeping, walking the dog and a little TV. I'm essentially a zombie.

I've got navigation buttons on each page, several layers of which would have to be redone for the rebuild you suggested, plus internal text-based links (within the caption text) on about half of the pages which lead either to other pages within the section or subsection (which would not have to be altered) as well as internal text-based links which lead to different sections which would have to be made into external links, and I'd have to determine the exact structure of the new split web-sections so I would know what the URL structure would be like before creating those links. I'd need to do that sort of external re-linking on about 100 pages or so, and sometimes five or ten times on a page.

The more I think about this, the more I realize how much time this would require. I'm not altogether sure it would be worth doing... but it really is a pretty good idea. I'll have to storyboard the job and see how much time it would actually require.

Thanks for the sympathy. Yes... my eyesight has deteriorated noticeably in the last few years, but some of that is expected. I am rapidly approaching the prune stage of existence.

Ron