Published Pages are deleted when directory structure changed in Publication during republishing

Question

I have changed the Folder structure from Publication properties and republished the Pages from their Structure Group. The Pages are published successfully but it also remove the same Page from old directory location.

How can I get the old directory with all the Pages into it? Remember it is not possible to copy that folder.

Answer 1

I think this is the default behaviour in Tridion Publications.

When you change the directory structure, it warns you, about this, that the pages are going to be published in the new configured paths, and removed from the old paths. Don't know where the problem is or I don't really understand the question.

Answer 2

If I understand your question correctly, you just want to migrate old pages into new folders. Unfortunately, that is not possible. This is not just because pages are in different folder, their path is also kept in Tridion Broker database. The only supported way, as far as I know, is to republish them to new location. That way all references (seen and unseen by you will be updated).

Answer 3

If you insist, you can always write a custom Storage Extension that will deploy your Page to multiple locations, one of the locations can be the one from Tridion, the other you would need to define and pass in somehow, but... Do note that this can be a world of hurt!

It will be up to you to make sure that both of the locations are updated, it will be up to you to handle what happens if one operations passes and the other one breaks, it will be up to you to always keep in mind this change, keep track of the references, have this in mind for future upgrades etc.

Because of all of this I strongly advice against venturing down this path.

Mihai wrote a blog about something similar some years ago, you can have a look here

Answer 4

Changing Structure Group paths is similar to moving pages. Content Delivery represents a set of published pages that may include up to all of the pages in the Content Manager.

You probably don't want all the past versions of page paths and names to continue existing in delivery. Otherwise delivery would include mistakes, typos, and things that should have been removed without a way to fix them.

Depending on the pages, I've seen a few approaches to have pages available in several locations in delivery.

1. Set up redirects so the same paths point to the desired pages. This will depend on the Web application ("how would you do it without Tridion?"), but you might publish pages from Tridion to handle part of the logic (path, metadata or template to redirect, etc.).
2. Create a child Publication with a different URL, subdomain, or path to store certain pages in a different URL. I typically wouldn't recommend this, but it worked for me for a simple requirement to publish some, but not all, assets/pages from an extranet to a public location.
3. If the pages don't change much or might differ from each other, copy the pages to separate locations so that they have different URLs but the same content.

For copied pages, keep dynamic linking rules in mind, which are based on template priority and proximity. But it all depends on your use case and what you're trying to achieve (see @Bart's comment).