More info on FPSE bot removal

There has been quite a bit of discussion about our last blog post, so I wanted to take a few minutes to respond to some of the persistent themes found in people’s comments. Specifically, I wanted to address the following two concerns:

  1. That Includes should not have been removed along with the rest of the bot functionality.
  2. That Page Transitions should have been removed.

First, let’s talk about Includes. When we first planned to remove bots, we knew that customers would find some pieces of functionality missing that they would want put back into the product (though not necessarily in the same form). Our plan has been that some of these components (for example Includes and the Photo Gallery) would be seen again in future releases of the product, though after redesigns that gave them additional functionality and/or made them more designer-friendly (in other words, fixing the issues that caused us to remove the features in the first place.

We agree, though, that this may not be enough in the case of Includes, since:

  1. They are already standards-compliant
  2. They do not require FPSE to be used correctly
  3. They are extremely useful for keeping large sites maintainable.

For this reason, we will be providing an Add-In after RTM that re-enables the ability to insert new Includes in Expression Web. In the mean time you can use Cheryl Wise’s snippet-based workaround for adding Includes, which can be found at https://by-expression.com/quick-bits/includes/index.aspx. Finally, in a future release you should expect to see a version of Include-like functionality re-integrated directly into the product.

Now, let’s turn to Page Transitions. It was our original intent to remove page transitions, but for technical reasons we decided that removing this feature was too risky this late in the release cycle. Please note, though, that we very well may remove this feature from one of our next releases.