Cutting vs deleting?

[L'il Suzie]

Silly question (sorry guys, but you're gonna get a lot of them from me over the next few days!)

What is the difference between cutting an item you don't want, and deleting it (which marks it with a red cross and needs to be purged to get rid of it?)

I've got sections that have been created not so much in error, but in the wrong way... having spent the day with a trainer from Teclan (we wanted to lock him up in our storeroom and keep him, but he got away!) my website is undergoing a complete overhaul... just want to make sure that I'm getting rid of stuff in the most efficient way!

[wjcampbe]

Cutting copies the item to your clipboard ready for pasting in a new location. If you cut a lot of items, sometimes they are added sequentially on the clipboard - once it passes a certain size it will be written from memory to disk and when you paste, you will get a choice of what to paste. Other times, the new cut overwrites the old one and that is now lost - it depends on how the software implements cut & paste.

The delete (which marks for deletion but does not remove anything) is a safer choice as you can change your mind at any time - until you do housekeeping | Purge contents. The problem here is that there is an actinic performance hit with a growing number of deleted (but not purged) items, which can lead to the software no longer functioning.

So - if you are sure you don't want the content - delete and purge. If you think you might need it, delete, but hold off on the purging.

If you want to rearrange using cut and paste - cut and paste.

[L'il Suzie]

Thanks Bill for your quick reply!

So, if I delete the content, and then upload my website onto the test area again, these items don't get uploaded and therefore it takes less time?

[wjcampbe]

When you upload, Actinic compares the date/time of each file on your hard drive with an Actinic maintained table of upload date/time and uploads those where the date/time on the file is more recent. It should also upload all files in the Advanced | Additional Files list.

When you delete a page, section or product, that file is removed from the list of files to be compared, and so should not be uploaded. There is a possibility that the old page could still be on the server (try typing a deleted page name into the browser address bar when you are viewing your site) until you do a full Web | Refresh Website, which deletes all the files on the server, then reloads everything - so can take a while.