Publish and Delete Files?

What is the correct procedure to remove old pages from my site using RW so they get deleted from my FTP? Republish all files seems extreme. I have removed old obsolete pages manually using my FTP app, just wondering if there’s a way to do it when publishing in RW?

In my experience- RW does not have the ability to delete any file from your server. Anything you delete from your project needs to be deleted manually via FTP.

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FTP or cPanel if you’re host has that.

RW won’t delete old files, resources, folders or pages with changed names. You need to do this manually via ftp or cPanel. if I have enough stuff built up I tend to delete everything in public_html (or equivalent) except non RW files like htaccess, google verifications etc and then publish afresh

I have done this exact thing often.

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I have often wondered how many RW websites have many many “dead” page files… unused but still indexed by search engines, etc. I don’t even recall reading anywhere in RW docs that RW does not delete anything. It may… I just don’t remember it…

I hope that someday RW can synchronize the files. That would simplify matters greatly.

For sync, I use Forklift - it’s a great (dedicated) ftp app.

Nopety nope, not happening, no way, NO!

The only way RW could remove old files off a server is if it was to remove ANYTHING that wasn’t in the current project so…
Bye bye htaccess
Bye bye any folder you may have created containing lord know what.
Bye bye every bit of cms data ever entered in to the site.
Bye bye custom fav icons.
Bye bye all sort of important stuff.

If you want to do a bit of server housekeeping then create a folder on your server called something like messy-backup, move everything you think is part of the site AS PUBLISED FROM RW in to it and then republish your site. If everything is ok then delete the backup, if not then restore the missing whatever.

htaccess and the other items you mention are not in a RW Project and thus I agree… RW has nothing to do with them. But wouldn’t it makes sense that if you delete an old page in RW it also delete the page files from your site next time connect? (publish)? At the very least it could issue a reminder or something for beginners… a reminder to delete the files from their server instead of letting old pages be indexed… New users don’t understand this.

I think the problem with RW trying to delete pages on the server is keeping track of what to delete. You can rename pages, change folder names, publish to a test location, publish locally, and change hosting providers. It Just seems they already have some problems on marking pages that have changed.

How do you set up Forklift to sync? Since it would need to sync with the project folder, and the user would need to also manage that setup, might it just be easier to delete and republish all the site RW files every so often?

@teefers: This would be quite simple if I am not mistaken. If you want to remove older unused files, you do not want to touch “3rd party” files from other scripts, unrelated files or folders, cms-created files or manually uploaded files. So, if RW would keep a list of uploaded files per server each time an upload is done, it would be possible to see changes and older files could be removed without any risk of deleting still needed files. RW would not delete files or folders unknown to the project-file of RW.
@PaulRussam: The only problematic files I could think of are thouse changed on the server after an upload via RW. But these files would be overwritten with the next upload anyway, right?

I think this would be a reasonable feature request. The only thing could be the performance with the upload, because each time the upload-history have to be checked. I do not know how much this would hit the upload process.

It obviously is something that can be done. Heck long ago DreamWeaver had syncing, and that made life easy. It had a cloaking feature to “hide” files on the FTP from being deleted.

Here’s a screenshot from Transmit for one of my sites, on the left is the as exported RW files on my Mac, on the right is the server.
As you can see there is a bucket load of files/folders on the server NOT present in the as exported RW project including the TotalCMS data folder which is 135mb.
Lets also point out thiat if you make use of the RW project backup feature, the backups would get deleted as they are not part of the exported project.

This ‘feature’ would be a disaster if implemented.

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Again… If I delete a page that is in my RW project I should at least get a reminder to delete it from my server. (for newbies) - Ideally, any associated resources (images) would also be given so they could be deleted. At best, RW would delete it via FTP.

NO we do not expect RW to delete what RW didn’t upload and what is NOT in the RW project… But if I have a TEST page and I delete it in RW why would I not expect RW to delete it from server, or give the option, or remind ME to do it via FTP (again, for new users who don’t know better.)

Instead it does nothing and it allows the new user who doesn’t know better to have old pages on the server and they are being indexed by SE’s.

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So a “do-not-touch-things-you-do-not-own”-policy for RW would solve this, right? Backups should be dealed with as needed. Of course, if you know what to delete on the server, it would be no problem. But I think it is a needed feature even for the not-newbie-weavers, because it keeps your website-pages clean. It happened to me, when using a password-stack from JoeWorkman. The page changed from html to php. But I could not see any change. Well, I was tired at that time and forget to clear the browser cache. I thought, this would be a problem with visitors as well.

Darn Romulan developers & their cloaking devices!

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Here’s a good reason why RW needs to delete files on the FTP that were deleted from the project: Recently I was converting ProGallery local image setups to warehoused image setups. Doing so requires changing the index.html file to an index.php file. Great, but I battled it for days not being able to get things to work. Then I looked in my FTP and I saw the index.html file was still there along with the index.php file. That was causing the problems. Once I deleted the index.html file then things worked correctly with my ProGallery warehoused image setups. The time I could have saved if RW had been able to delete the file on my FTP as I had done in my project.

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Never, never, never ask that RW deleted files automatically from your server! You see the problems people have here with correct publishing? Now imaging problems with deletion of too many files.

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