How to force page refresh after site upgrade

[lefty]

I have just upgraded our site from V7 to V9 and got the new site working (have overwritten the old site on the same server and with same page names for everything).

People who have visited the site before are still seeing old pages as their browsers have them cached and they cannot place orders.

How can I force a refresh of all pages from our web server for a while so I can be sure that everyone is always seeing the current version of the pages?

[lefty]

Update

Spoke to Actinic support about this and was told that as it is a local browser thing we can only ask people to clear their caches and there is nothing that can be done to force a page refresh.

A bit of research myself found this advice - insert the following code between head tags of pages that you want to force a refresh for

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">

Any one know anything about this? I guess you would not want to leave this in place for all pages for too long as it must slow down the site a lot and use a lot of bandwidth.

[Bruce King]

Keith,

That would work to get the new pages loaded on the customers end, though as you mentioned it would not be a good idea to keep it in for a long period as it would really eat up bandwidth and slow down page load times by quite a bit. It may be better to inform your customers via a newsletter of the changes and advise them to clear their local cache so that they can view the new pages.

Regards,

[lefty]

Update and testing

Have tested it and it does not seem to work anyway! Still need to do a manual refresh to see latest version of page. I guess if the local browser is just reading the page from its cache it will never get to see the pragma code.

Tested again by making a page change after the pragma code version was already in my browser cache. Displayed the page again by just using the url, with no refresh, and it DOES force a new page read from the server and show my changes.

It seems like it is only worth using the pragma code on pages that are updated regularly or it will just slow down the site without solving my problem of people who have previously visited y old V7 site still seeing those same pages when they first arrive.

Any other ideas?

[jont]

Found this via Google

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=JavaScript>
function now(){
    window.location.reload(true);
}
</SCRIPT>

no idea if it works or if it will kill your site so use with care