Go CMS content disappeared

Classic Stacks
1

I converted my client site: bedonwelltraining.co.uk to Go CMS about a year back, initially just a few sections and later pretty much the whole site. All has been fine for about 6 months.

Today, I made some minor changes outside of the CMS (to the address in the footer and coordinates of the open street map on contact page), publsihed and now ALL CMS content throughout the site has vanished, just leaving the site framework and a few sections that are not CMS enabled.

Content is all standard stuff - this site does not use the blog. I have published Rapidweaver changes before with no loss to the CMS.

Any ideas? I have messaged @Yabdab and am sure heā€™ll be in touch shortly. However, this is client content so keen to get help from wherever possible!

2

So you canā€™t see the GoCMS content using an FTP program? The actual data folder has gone?

3

No the data folder is where it should be and it has data in it! And the Key document is where it should be in Resources all correctly filled out.

Itā€™s as if publishing the RW file has replaced the go CMS content stacks with new versions that no longer sync. Canā€™t see why though.

4

Ouch. Thatā€™s definitely one for @yabdab. Hope you get it sorted.

Rob

1 Like
5

I am no expert here, but I am using the CMSgo blog on a website. On the server under ā€œrw_common/plugins/stacks/cmsgo/dataā€ you probably find archives like ā€œpage3.php.gzā€, which contain the content of the CMSgo entry on this page. ā€œpage3ā€ will refer to the page as stacks is using it in the e.g. php file on the corresponding published page. I would check whether the published page (the index.php file) still uses the same reference ā€˜page3ā€™.

I have no idea, whether this could change, but I was worried, too, whether any change in the website with RW/ stacks could inadvertently change the internal page reference (in my example ā€˜page3ā€™), because then the CMSgo data still sitting on the server would loose their connection to the respective page ā€¦

This is not a fix, just an idea to check whether something in the internal page numbering has changed with the republishing, which might have thrown off the CMSgo links

Good luck

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6

Apparently changing page hierarchy can cause issues. However, I have a test site where I move things around deliberately and I havenā€™t been able to break Go CMS yet. Iā€™m working through the gz files in Data to see if any page names are different. @yabdab got in touch straight away so as usual good support and hopefully will fix. If the worst comes to the worst, I can replace the public_html folder with an older back-up which should fix things. It would still leave me with the issue as to why it happened but at least I could try again forewarned!

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7

Thanks for investigating this further. Please report back about your findings. It could be helpful for many to learn what one can or should not do to avoid throwing CMSgo links off. Much appreciated.

8

OK - following a suggestion by @yabdab Iā€™m reasonably sure that the problem lies with the recent Stacks update (4.1.4) and the Go CMS Content stacks. I canā€™t be sure it wasnā€™t 4.1.3 however.

If you upgrade to stacks 4.1.4 and then republish any Go CMS page, the content on the site will be overwritten by the content (or lack of) in the Go CMS stacks in your RW project.

I tested this on a small test Go CMS page I had forgotten about, by changing the page header (which is outside of Go CMS) and then publishing. All CMS content disappeared. I put the content back in using Go CMS on-page, and everything was fine from then on - including further page re-publishes.

The reason I lost so much on my main project is that I changed some footer text which is in a partial and site-wide. As all pages were re-published I lost CMS content on all those pages.

Hopefully @yabdab and @isaiah can get this sorted asap as I canā€™t update my clientā€™s address and map!

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9

Thank you for circling back ā€¦ thatā€™s a scary situation, until a solution or a fix becomes available. Imagine your entire blog is lost after a minor update ā€¦

Hope @yabdab can chime in, whether there are any precautions possible (e.g. BackUp/Restore), or whether one must refrain from any page update with Stacks 4.1.4 at the moment ?

10

I don think the actual data file is overwritten, but the name changes. I will look into this and see what can be done to prevent this.

2 Likes
11

Iā€™m assuming that the site is working right now and you have a backup like TimeMachine of the project file before the stacks update. If so, why not just back out the update and go back to 4.13 until it gets fixed? Older versions are here Stacks.

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12

Yes I thought of this straight after that last post. The only question mark is which version of stacks this may have started with. Iā€™m assuming 4.1.4 but it may have been earlier. With CMS projects I often donā€™t look at the website for months on end and the clients donā€™t always do much either. Yabdab is on the case so maybe there will be a fix shortly anyway

13

I agree - I did a quick comparison of previous and current data files and there doesnā€™t appear to be any loss.

14

Indeed, but keep in mind that if you have backups you can always replace your project or entire public_html folder with a previous one. This is what I have done for now and all is back to normal - except the non CMS changes I was trying to make. You would lose the new blog post however.

If I have time, I will roll back to the previous version of stacks and test that

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15

I put RW back to Stack 4.1.0 today (released 13th November 2020) and made some non-CMS changes to a page with Go CMS in it. All the CMS content on that page disappeared.

I must stress, making on-page Go-CMS changes are no problem at all. Itā€™s just when the Rapidweaver project is republished the Go CMS disappears.

Before this instance, the last time I republished a RW project with GoCMS content was in October 2020 so using Stacks 4.0.xx. Iā€™ll roll the project back to that and see what happens.

16

Did you restore the project file back to a version before the stacks release that caused issue? If the stacks release is the culprit in changing the pageID then it may have changed the project file. Just a guess.

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17

If you mean revert to an earlier version of RW, no I didnā€™t do this, principally because the release dates of RW 8.7 and Stacks 4.1 were very close and I have no record of when I updated what.

What I have done just now is to:

  1. Build a test GO CMS project using Stacks 4.0.4 (the last version of the last release of Stacks.
  2. Add some Go CMS content directly on-page, and save.
  3. Add some further non CMS content and republish the RW file.
  4. All Good. Both CMS and non CMS content is where it should be.

I thenā€¦

  1. Updated Stacks to 4.1.0
  2. Amended the non-CMS content in Rapidweaver and republished.
  3. The Go-CMS content was over-written by whatever was in the Go Content stacks in the RW project i.e. if they were empty, the CMS content on web page disappeared. If they still had the default lorem ipsum, the web poage was replaced with this)

So it appears the issue is to do with the Stacks 4.1.0 update and Go CMS content not playing nicely. Of course I didnā€™t go back to a Rapidweaver 8.6 version and test that also.

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