I have built quite a lot of Custom Web Publishing-solutions with Filemaker 5.5 & 6 and have just recieved version 7. Now I am converting my solutions to version 7, but how can I test if my web-systems work now? What happened to Custom Web Publishing?? The manual only mentions Instant Web Publishing, which still, In my humble opinion, is useless for serious use. And I, of course, need to be able to test my pages before moving them to the server, physically another place in town.

How do I connect to my web pages under FMP 7? Am I overlooking something obvious?

Pleeease don't tell me they have removed this function from FMP 7! It is my main reason for using Filemaker!

They have not removed this feature from FM7, but they have changed it substantially. All custom web publishing now requires Filemaker Server Advanced, and CDML is no longer used. Filemaker's replacement for this involves the use of XML. There are several ways to use this XML:

1. Server side XSLT to convert the resulting XML into HTML

2. FX.php to access and manipulate the XML data with PHP.

3. Lasso 7

I'm sure there are others, but these are the main three. FMI supplies a CDML converter to help in the process of converting your CDML markup to XSLT stylesheets.

If you don't want to spring for the full server advanced for simple testing you can just buy Filemaker 7 Devleoper, which includes a 3-client developer license for Server Advanced.

Finally, while I agree that IWP was partly to mostly useless in FM6, it has come a long way in FM7... I'm using it now to manage the scheduling of instruments for 100+ users. (not concurrent of course)