VCU - Technology Services

When a website is established, a content editor may decide they no longer need a page. The editor can delete the page in SmartEdit and republish the site. When the site is republished, the page will be removed from the navigation. The page no longer exists in the CMS project. However, the page may still exist on the end server. Additionally, that page might still be crawlable by search engines. If a user has bookmarked that page, the page will not return a 404 error, because it still exists on ther server.

OpenText CMS has a feature that will delete all the pages on the end server that have been deleted from the CMS project. This is called "clean up live server". (Note: "live server" in this case is not associated with "Live Server" - an additional product from OpenText)

WARNING!!
Do not use this feature if you use subdirectories or multiple publishing packages. When running a publishing job, "clean up live server" will delete entire directories from the live server.

To install on Server:

1. Delete all the files in the server folder RedDot -> ASP -> RedDotTemp (this has been done for VCU)

SmartTree setup:

1. In SmartTree -> Administer Project Settings -> Project -> Project Variants -> HTML -> Edit Project Variant
2. Under Language Variant check "clean up live server"
3. Republish files and check live server for deletion of old files

In my testing, "clean up live server" works fine for small, flat websites.

So what about those sites that have directories? Once a week I do the following:

1. SmartTree -> Administer Project Structure -> Project -> Actions Menu -> Clear Page Cache
2. Publish entire site from Home page, publish following and related pages.
3. Go into live server and look for any pages which do not have the most recent publication date. Research pages and delete.