Publishing Problems in Foundry 3 Project

I have a F3 project that has worked perfectly for some time, but yesterday I had to make some changes. This caused all sorts of problems when I tried to publish the site. Firstly, it would not publish all of the files for some reason.

Then I discovered some very weird behavior in the exporting process. The resources folder, which should only have a few PNG and SVG files, some of the files are replaced with folders (of the same name as the PNG or SVG file) that contain a bunch of large images that are not from my project. In fact, there ends up being close to 1GB of data in these folders, which is unacceptable, of course.

Below is a screenshot of one of these folders.

Each of the folders has a hierarchy of folders that match the page hierarchy of the site, and each of these folders have the same images in them.

Does anyone have any ideas what is going on here? I have never seen anything like this before. What is even more disconcerting is where the random images are coming from that are in these folders. I should also mention that some of these images also end up in the root “files” folder/ I have no idea where they originate from, possibly from the theme the site was built from, not sure.

Needless to say this is very worrying as I cannot properly publish the site. I have had to resort to publishing to a LOCAL folder and then FTP the files onto the server. Which is less than optimal.

I don’t know if these problems are an RW one or a Stacks one. I’d appreciate any insights.

Have you tried the “Re-Publish all Files” option in the File menu?

Sorry to hear you’re having issues in Classic. Seeing you mention all those random images, it reminded me of an old stacks bug — There’s a very long thread over on Stack4All about it and I’m wondering if it’s the same issue (as it was never fixed), have a read and see what you think.

If you can send us the project file we could do a little digging and try and find out what’s going on!

Aloha Dan,

I read that lengthy thread, what scary stuff. I have started digging into this project to see if I can track down the problem. The project size has grown from one that used to hover around 100MB to slightly under 1GB. Scary.

There are so many images in that Your Head shared data folder, simply unbelievable.

What I don’t understand is why this suddenly started happening.

Once I can get the project down to a manageable size I’ll send you a link to it. Right now it would be to big to be useful.

I have done this numerous times with little luck. I finally did an update from a local folder and FTP to my server. So I got it working that way. But I still have a massive project with almost 300 images I have never seen before.

I watched the Stacks video and removed all of the externals I could find as well as all the images. But it seemed to have little effect and any time I did a save of the project the images all came back. I had no other projects open as it seemed like that might have been a source of some of the problems.

I did some further digging into the project file and was surprised to find that in the RESOURCES folder there were 5 folders all with copies of the PROJECT in them. Because each project accounted for a 163MB this was one of the sources of all the extra crud. Why are these here and why so many copies?

I removed some of these to get the project size down to a reasonable size.

Let me know how you would like me to send it as it is still in the 193MB in size.

Looking at your screenshots, we’re wondering if somehow the favicons have had the wrong resource applied to them.

Can you try deleting all the Web Icons (click on the drop well and press delete) and then exporting your site to a new folder locally — Let us know how you get on.

@handshaper This problem has happened for several people. I’m guessing you are facing the same problem. … and the problem has never been fixed by the Stacks plugin (though it will likely be fixed once the standalone Stacks Pro is released).

The “problem” is a feature of Stacks called externals. And the problem seems to only arise when you have more than one project open in RW. Here’s the conditions under which it happens: you have a project open, but you open a second project into RW … AND … that second project contains externals. I’ve never used externals myself, but I had looked at someone else’s work that did have externals. Under those circumstances then added images and other stuff from the “other” project get transferred (or infected) into the the project already open. (BTW, maybe I’m wrong and all the resources from one project will transfer to another one if both are open at the same time … even if no one used externals … not completey 100% sure on this.)

Is there a solution to avoid this? Yes. Just make sure you never open more than one project at a time in RW.

The trickier part is how to get rid of the added elements that have transferred automagically to a new project. A couple of years ago I made a short video about how to do this. It contains no narration, so I hope it’s clear enough. Needless to say, make a backup/copy of your original file first so you have something to go back to if worse comes to worse.

Here’s the link:

Feel free to ask questions if it’s not clear enough.

Aloha Dan,

OK, I did that and this is what I end up with, there is still one folder named after a Favicon and it contains a hierarchy of folders matching the page hierarchy of the site. Inside each of the pages there is a DATA folder that contains images that are NOT from the site. Very weird.

I sure wish Elements was ready for the real world so I can rebuild this site and push it out in place of the Stacks based version.

Thank you I will watch the video and see if I have any luck. If not I’ll have questions.

Looks like its improved the output a little. Can you also make sure favicon.png is deleted from the Resources browser.

OK, after deleting the Favicon from the resource browser the folder with the same name no longer appears in the resources output. Yippee!

I also discovered that there was an event that might have triggered this whole process. When I first opened this project to make some changes RW told me there were some resources it could not locate and asked me to find them. I did this and that process seemed to have created the multiple versions of the project that were embedded in Resources folder inside the project. I found this because I deleted all but one of them. Then when I reopened the project it told me there were some missing resources, so I told it to forget about them. Since then there has only been a single instance of the project in the Resources folder and the size of the project has gone down to 193MB.

Does this make any sense.

I also discovered that Stacks appears to have cached some images in the Application Support/Stack5 folder in the Finder. These are some of the images that keep showing up on the various pages when the site is exported. I have tried deleteing them but they keep reappearing.

Yup, perfect. I’m glad you’ve the project back into shape!

Unfortunately, this is an ongoing Stacks issue and not something we can fix :pensive:

At least I have now managed to get my backups of this project down from 134MB to 18MB, that is a great improvement.

As mentioned before I can’t wait to move this site to Elements. Most of it has already been done, just waiting on a contact solution.

I am now also able to publish properly again.

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