Changing page names on products

[robinantill]

Hi,
I enter a new product i.e. 'Puppet on a String' and by default Actinic names the web page (page settings) Puppet_on_a_String.html. I then decide to change this to puppet-string.html. However when I update the web site both web pages are uploaded i.e Puppet_on_a_String.html and puppet-string.html. As Puppet_on_a_String.html is not used how can I stop this happening?

Do I need to go into the folder where the files are stored and delete them manually? and if so and I delete one of the web pages for one of my products by accident what will happen then. Will Actinic regenerate a new web page?

Two reasons I want to clear these out. One is the amount of extra time involved in uploading and the second is that I like my web sites to be cleaned from any surplus files.

I did try Housekeeping and Purge_content but this did not clear these old web pages out.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,
Robin

[leehack]

Don't click apply until you have finished completing all fields would stop that i'd have thought?

[robinantill]

Hi Lee,
Thanks for that and that would work. Problem is that I have taken over running this web site and need to clean all the pagenames, from the default, to something which makes more sense. i.e. all in small letters for one thing. not some with small letters, some with large letters and some with a mix.
Regards,
Robin

[RuralWeb]

one sure way to trash all your serps IMO

[jont]

Robin - how are you renaming the files? You should do this in Actinic and then you will only ever have the one file uploaded. If they have uploaded previously the old will be on the server and the new will be sent as a differnt file name.

I add new-sections-with-hyphens to generate the .html pagename and then go back to make it human readable.

As Mal say you can do more harm than good in deleting files from the servers.

[robinantill]

Hi Jont,

I renamed then in Actinic and then saved with the new name. However it still shows the old file in the Site1-SiteHTML folder as well as the renamed file.

When I upload it uploads both versions. I did rename the acatalog folder on the server so that would not be used. I then created a new acatalog folder and refreshed the web site and this still uploaded the old files.


I have not deleted any files off the server, but they don't appear to be going.

Any further ideas please.

Regards,
Robin

[AndyBorrett]

AFAIK Actinic does not delete any unused html files from the server when they are no longer used ie; when you delete a section. I have never heard of Actinic uploading non existant pages before though.

If you are taking over the site and want to start with a clean slate I would FTP into your server, delete evrything then let Actinic upload everything again with a web site refresh.

I would wait to see if anyone thinks this is a bad idea before doing it though.

As for renaming sections - you would end up with the Search Engines pointing to non existing pages which would not be good.

[robinantill]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for that, but I did delete everything on the server and then uploaded the site and Actinic uploaded all the old pages as well as the new pages.

I have set up a redirect 301 from the old pages to the new pages so that would solve the problem of pages being missing. The site was so bad it did not receive hardly any traffic from Google etc.

It's not the end of the world but any other ideas would be gratefully received so that when I upload, in view of the time taken, it would only be the up to date files being uploading.

I have testing this on a dummy website so it does not affect the live site.

Regards,
Robin