Bruce, I don’t see how anything in this release note resolves the main issue you rightly bring up: the fact that RW’s “publishing” function does half the job by only UL’ing new files without deleting, or providing the option to delete, orphan files. As you mentioned before, Dreamweaver (which I never want to go back to, for various reasons) actually did this very smoothly. I’m not as sympathetic as some forum members to the RW Guys for not working on this—I agree with you that it is an important practical issue. Also sorry your basic point got hijacked into interesting but not directly related discussions of SEO matters and redirects.
For now, I’m really sick of searching for “dead” files and wiping them out manually.
Would appreciate the RW gurus commenting on this strategy: 1) publish to site and just live with dead files; 2) every once in a while, publish to local folder (export) AFTER deleting everything in that folder; 3) after that export, use Transport (my ftp app of choice) to sync from local folder to site while setting the sync to delete orphans but also using a Transport “Rule” to “Skip” certain protected folders, like .hta files and various non-RW pages and stuff.
Sound feasible? Hope the Brighton boys seriously consider finishing the job in ver. 8.
Oh got it, No you will just leave them there normally because even after Google updates their index, that doesn’t mean that some other site, blog whatever that may have a link to that page will.
That’s why they exist so you can move things & update content without hurting SEO by having dead pages.
@ronr,
I agree it would be better for folks to stick to the original topic or start a new topic, but at least the deviation is somewhat related.
Now back to Publish and Delete Files:
I read a lot of it won’t ever happen, but not why, except that some FTP files not in the RW project would get deleted. Ok, but that sounds like an excuse since we know DreamWeaver could do the sync, and FTP apps can too. I’d like to know why it’s impossible to have RW delete files from the FTP that were deleted from the project?
I share your bewilderment. It’s surely a half-ass functionality. Perhaps the boys from Brighton (I enjoy their amusing podcast banter, even when it does take them forever to start talking about RW) do have more pressing issues to contend with. But just as they have an excellent ecosystem of stacks/plugins developers, wonder if they could farm out development of the publish function to a third party?
In the meantime, my method described above of re-publishing everything via an ftp app with a ‘skip sync’ function (for non-RW files) seems to work OK.