When I tried to publish a project using FTP, and the site was down (i.e., SS Pro could not connect), in addition to getting the error, SS Pro also published the index page to my local directory.

Is this the normal procedure when publishing to a remote site and a connection cannot be established? If so, I'm not pleased with it. This over-wrote some custom changes made to the local index file which was going to be uploaded to the remote site after the entire project was published.

I think this is normal. For a FTP publish, SS builds the project to your defined local publish folder, then uploads to the site from there -- if it can!

Was the index page one of the pages you intended to publish? If it wasn't, then it seems like a bug -- SS should be building only those pages intended for upload.

Thanks Bruce. I was afraid this was the case. Yes, the index page was being published, and I was intending to upload the edited version after publishing to the remote site.

This may not be a bug, but I still do not like this method. If I have a valid working version in a local directory, make some changes to my project and publish remotely, then find I do not like the changes, I thought I could just re-upload (via FTP) the local pages. Now I find that I cannot as the local version has also been modified.

Maybe the Publisher's Export Destination choices could be a bit clearer; like "My Web Host and Local Directory" and "Files on Disk (only)". Or use temporary files/directories to create the upload pages.

I can see some advantages of having your local publish directory being a mirror of your site.

If you need them to be different, why not set up another publishing profile so that you have one for just a publish to disk and another that is a mirror of your site?

That could be done, but my naming conventions for profiles (so I know what the profiles are) conflict with the current bug in the way SS & SSPro handles similar profile names.