Forum OpenACS Q&A: ACS3 : preventing .tcl/.adp parsing in certain directories

We've got a legacy site running on aD ACS 3, and the client
wants to be able to create static HTML in dreamweaver and ftp it
to a subdirectory on the site.

Not that I distrust the client :), but does anyone know if there's a
way to tell nsd or the request processor to not interpret .tcl or
.adp files within specific parts of the directory tree?

Don't know about the "don't interpret" part but how many pages are you talking about? I was on an ACS 3.4 project that pretty successfully used the file-manager to avoid having to turn on FTP to the server. You can restrict upload to certain directories (OK it is not fool proof as folks can navigate the full site from clicking the www link, but...), have it exec CVS for you (my favorite feature), and - the part that makes this relevant to your question - do some screening for bad html and adp tags before allowing the upload. Having to upload file by file makes this not a great solution for volume transfers, but it does allow someone without shell access to find out how templated pages are going to look with content filled in.
This would be a reasonable complex subsite - more files and
directories than it'd be reasonable to use file-manager for. They
want to be able to create and maintain the content in
Dreamweaver (or somesuch) and use it's "publish to FTP site"
feature.
I would try using a registered proc that took the url and called

ns_returnfile [ns_url2file $url]