Technology Tobi on 06 Jan 2009 03:40 pm
iWeb ’09 Adds FTP Support
Apparently Apple finally listened to the many users requesting direct FTP support. Quote:
Rather use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to publish to a different hosting service? With the built-in FTP support in iWeb, you can do that, too.
I am curious to see if this works as seamlessly as syncing via .Mac or MobileMe…
on 28 Jan 2009 at 13:27 # Peter Russell
I have just upgraded two of my many Macs to iLife ’09 from iLife ’08. Both are running the latest versions of Leopard with all latest updates.
For reasons of logistics, each Mac maintains a separate iWeb website with all associated files in order to keep everything separated. One Mac publishes a site to my MobileMe account which has domain forwarding and, until today, worked perfectly. The other Mac is used to publish an iWeb site to a local folder and then Cyberduck is used to upload the site to my domain.
After backing up the domain sites on each Mac, iLife ’09 was installed. On both Macs iWeb ’09 opened each site successfully and I was able to make modifications and save the work.
However, on the Mac that was formerly used to publish to a local folder, when I did the same thing to check that everything was OK prior to using iWeb ’09 to publish via FTP, I noticed that all the internal hyperlinks had changed to a variation of the URL for my OTHER site on the other Mac, even though the links were correct when checked with the Inspector! However, I was actually able to publish to a local folder; something that I found impossible on the Mac set up to publish to MobileMe.
On attempting to use the other Mac to publish to my MobileMe account, iWeb ’09 initially created all the new pages, as anticipated, but then threw up an error message “Publish Error – an unknown error occurred”. When attempting to publish to a local folder EXACTLY the same thing happened.
After repairing Permissions and trashing the iWeb preferences file I was finally able to publish to a local folder, but I still get an unspecified error when trying to publish to MobileMe.
What is going on and how can I fix it, short of going back to iLife ’08?
Any help would be appreciated
on 29 Jan 2009 at 6:40 # Peter Russell
Interestingly, I logged out of MobileMe, rebooted as a precaution and then (on my MobileMe-aimed Mac), decided to publish to a local folder. I published the site a total of three times to different folders and EACH time ended up with only about 90% of the correct contents! Typically around 30Mb of each site was missing, and it wasn’t always the same content either! iWeb ‘08 wasn’t totally brilliant, but at least it was consistent!
So far I have not been able to publish the site to MobileMe at all using iWeb ‘09. I still get an unspecified error. Even checking the logs gives no indication of where the problem lies. I’ve fired off a report to Apple but it’s early days yet…
I do hate it when something that basically works fairly well (iWeb ‘08) is “tweaked” and the whole shooting match falls apart. Smacks of poor planning and testing in the real world. However, on the up side, I find iPhoto ‘09 to be superb, but haven’t tried iDVD ‘09 or iMovie ‘09 yet as I don’t want to become too disappointed too soon.
on 29 Jan 2009 at 17:11 # Tobi
As the comments above and these two discussion threads show (Macrumors, Apple Discussions), there seem to be plenty of problems with the new FTP feature. I have not yet upgraded to iLife ’09. I was planning to do so this week, but at this point I rather wait for the first software update.
Of interest may be this excerpt from a MacFixIt Featured Article:
iWeb Several users are reporting problems with iWeb’s options for publishing via FTP. In various scenarios it does not seem to be working, and seems to be caused for some by improperly formatted URLs in the FTP settings, and for others by some server settings.
Format URLs properly Some users have found that text entered into the URL fields in iWeb’s FTP settings can stick there, and be added to newly entered text if users partially enter information and return to complete the settings later on. Users have fixed this problem by clicking outside of the settings’ text field to take focus off of it, and then click the field again, pressing command-A to select all data, and re-entering the URL information. If users are still having problems, they can try entering variations to the URLs as follows:
* http://ftp.example.com
* http://ftp.example.com/
* ftp://ftp.example.com
* ftp://ftp.example.com/
Likewise, users can add or remove slashes from the directory path, such as the following:
* directory/path
* directory/path/
* /directory/path
* /directory/path/
The specific requirements for URL formatting may depend on the hosting service’s settings and setup, though trying combinations of these may help.
Change server settings to “Linux” Many users with FTP problems are hosting their sites on the popular “GoDaddy” hosting service, and have found that the problems are due to their sites using “Windows” hosting. In these instances, switching their sites to “Linux” hosting has fixed the problem. For other hosting services there may be similar options to have dedicated or virtual hosts, and various operating systems running the sites. Since “Linux” and “Unix” hosts seem to be more compatible with iWeb, users should inquire with their hosting services about these options.