So I downloaded the trial, persevered with creating a landing page, just about managed to create it. It is a simple one landing page with ten jpegs not very large. That’s it, one page. Bought a license and then went to publish. Elements outputted a folder of 4 thousand files most seem to be nonsense .php files which are tiny. It takes ages to upload even in Transmit. Please tell me this can be rectified because it doesn’t seem right.
As far as I know that only happens on the first publish of the page. After that Elements only publishes changes. Still… quite a huge amount of files, even it’s “only” a whooping 2.600 files for a simple “coming soon” page.
It looks like many of the pages are there to support features which are in development. CMS is not here yet, but there are php files. There is also support for people who use custom components and use the api. Even support for people who use shell access and like the hands on approach.
One thing that I did not like is if you change a file name or title in the page settings it will not remove that old folder even if you do a full publish. I also found an instance where changing a name does not update all the links that point to it.
I’ll do some more testing as time permits before I submit a bug report.
That is our “backend framework” used by the Forms and CMS, currently it gets uploaded if you’re not using those features and it’s something we hope to improve in the future. As @pumpkin said, this is only the first time you upload your site, subsequent publishes will only upload the changed files.
Again, we’ll be improving the way this all works in the future.
We chose the safest option to not delete pages/resources from the server. However, we have discussed adding an option where we could present a list of files that look like they are no longer used and let the customer decide to delete them, it would be a manually process, but it’s better than accidentally having important files deleted!
Hope that helps!
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