Publishing from Expression Web 4 to S3

Question

I have started moving some of my sites over to the static hosting that is offered on Amazon S3 buckets.  Unfortunately S3 does not provide native support for FTP or WebDav to any of its buckets.

The API documentation for Expression Web on MSDN seems quite light.  It had looked like http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.iserviceprovider.aspx might provide an interface that could be implemented in order to provide a new publishing method, but it doesn't have members to handle moving files.

Has any other user found a clean native or open source solution to publishing to S3 from Expression Web 4?

Or, has any plugin developers stumbled across any leads for an interface that can be implemented in order to provide a new publishing method?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is the first ever question about Amazon S3, so I doubt you'll find anything.

Amazon has provided their own, proprietary upload tool. Do they have an API for it? Do they allow any other upload methods?

I can't imagine that there'd be much of a market for such a non-standard site hosting arrangement.

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Answer 2

 A quick search found this:

http://www.bucketexplorer.com/

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Expression Web MVP

Answer 3

You'd have to ask Amazon S3 if there is any way to bypass their "bucket" interface / S3 file manager, or if they would even allow you to do so.

Answer 4

They do have a full REST API which is how it can work through its own web interface and third party tools like CloudExplorer, JungleDisk, etc. have been able to try to remap it.  it's initial purpose was to back other forms of applications, like the Netflix movie library for instance.  The web hosting feature on it is very new still, but from a price perspective, better than most other hosting solutions assuming you don't need server side code.

As far as leveraging the API, that was my question about an implementable interface for a plugin to Expression Web that would allow it publish to a new interface.  Implementation I would be happy to do and to share if I knew where I could slot it in. 

Answer 5

I may have not stated myself well.  CloudBerry, BucketExplorer, et al are just UIs on top of the existing S3 interfaces.  Uploading to S3 through the web or AJAX isn't an issue.  I am specifically looking to integrate with the publish functionality of Expression Web as either a new type of site provider or through a free shim layer to create an FTP or WebDav local service endpoint.

Answer 6

Then I'd suggest you read Creating an Expression Web Add-in and then contact the author using his site. Jim not only writes books on Expression Web but he works for Microsoft and maybe able to put you in touch with someone who can answer your questions on creating a publishing add-in.

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