RapidWeaver Version 7.3 (18575) Problem

You might want to look at the file manager with NS:
https://knowledge.web.com/Support/70044/70044/en-US/Article/View/110/Network-Solutions-How-Do-I-Get-Started-with-the-File-Manager

Take a look at what got published since FileZilla shows you were able to publish I think the problem is where your files are publishing.

The file manager if it shows different dates/times then FileZilla shows then the problem maybe with the FTP Server name you have (an IP address).
Most of the time IP address FTP names are temporary, but not sure if that is how NS works or not.

I wish there were some way of talking to the folks at RapidWeaver. Or at the Open theme. RapidWeaver might want to blame the theme. The theme might say it isn’t their fault. But what do I do, with this hot political situation going on in town? Our side is unable to respond to those who want to bulldoze our beautiful hillsides and kill our habitat and our ocean views. This breaks my heart.

Have you tried changing the path to htdocs ? Apparently that is the standard NetSol folder.

Yes… I did! It worked better, but it still isn’t right as you can see if you read the voluminous history on this (which really is only 1/50th of the history that I have been through on this.) It is getting so frustrating!

Thanks for the suggestion about the file manager document! I will look at that next. But I would think that the NetSol folks would have told me about those things during the hours I have spent on the phone with them trying to figure this out.

I think you might want to hand over access to someone you trust so they can get in and take a look. This is quite bizarre! I have read troublesome stuff about NetSol but it’s a few years back. If you could trust me with the project, I’d be interested to try temporarily publishing it on our test server so we can be sure there’s no weird stuff with the project itself. You could then look at that. Then we could all be sure that the problem lies with NetSol set up. FYI I have a RW and Wordpress development business and, as a reseller for Clook, we host around 50 sites: URL is kikk.co.uk

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Re-creating your site is not the problem. It’s not the issue nor the solution.

But your site has issues with organization. For example you have two version of this page:

http://www.malibuopenspace.org/page-5/

and

http://www.malibuopenspace.org/page-3/page-5/

Neither of them seem to have the updated sentence. So the issue is what pages are actually getting published and which pages are correctly or incorrectly named, and which pages and URL’s you are actually looking at to see if your page is updated after it is uploaded. All that makes for a very confusing situation to check if files are being published.

So there are at least two issues to address: publishing and site organization/page names.

The publishing issue seems to have been solved somewhat in as much as RW was able to publish something.

But now you really have to figure out your site’s actual page structure, make sure the pages are named correctly (and any links to them are correct) in your project in RW, and then delete the incorrectly named pages from your server with FileZilla. After that you will be able to see if the pages you’ve updated have been successfully published.

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…and just to add to this well observed point, file names like page-4 are of no value to SEO or site organisation anyway. The best way is actually to create a relevant folder name for each page and leave the page name as index.html (or index.php for some plug-ins)

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I agree with David.

Your current IP address (From DNS) is
206.188.192.144
your FTP server name is:
205.178.145.65
I would check out what the file manager shows on your website first if it is different than what you see with FileZilla than you are having an issue with the FTP Server Name.
The other thing you could test is just change something on your home page and republish just that page.

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Wow. That’s heavy. Because when I look at my list of pages on my menu at left in the RW page layout, I do NOT see two pages of anything.

Thank you so much. You all are being so generous with your time. I am so grateful!

I find it fascinating that I have an IP address that differs from the FTP server name, but I have had so many people at Network Solutions trying to help me (the web hosting department and the MyTime department) that this is not surprising. One of the departments told me to change the server name to a different number, but did not tell me that it would be necessary to change the IP address at the same time. Doug, I deduce from your note that they should be the same.

I just called up the Network Solutions file manager and found that that was helpful.

One aspect of this mystery that I didn’t spend much time addressing – because I thought it was completely irrelevant – I will tell you now, in case you are interested. It might be quite helpful. I think I did actually write about up higher. I know I wrote about it to one of you on this thread, but when I went to look for it and reference it I could not find it so I will repeat it here.

I always have owned the domain names MalibuVoice.org and MalibuVoice.com. When I was publishing this first for the MOSA board to view and edit and make comments, they didn’t yet know what they wanted to name the website. So, I used MalibuVoice.org on which to publish one of the preliminary versions.

When they decided on the name, they also said they wanted me to get the domain name from and publish with GoDaddy. So I got the MalibuOpenSpace name at GoDaddy and tried to publish there. In the process of making revisions before publishing at GoDaddy, I got the little notice that I should upgrade to RW7.3, which I did. Then I tried to publish at GoDaddy, but the site wouldn’t publish. When I called GoDaddy tech support and explained the situation, they were unhelpful. They tried to blame RapidWeaver because no one there ever had heard of it. I told them it was a great web creation program and many people used it, but they acted like it was some amateur upstart program and I figured they just didn’t want to be bothered. I knew it had published successfully already (and been updated many times) on the Network Solutions hosted domain name (MalibuVoice.org) even though the website was not named that, itself. So I called Network Solutions and asked them if I could have the MalibuOpenSpace.Org name POINTED TO some empty space on the MalibuVoice.org site. They said they would do this, and that I could retain the MalibuOpenSpace.Org domain name (site is actually named Malibu Open Space Alliance, (we call it MOSA), but that is too long for a domain name.

When Doug suggested I review the NetworkSolutions File Manager, I decided to see whether the OLD site (which I had been planning to take down) at MalibuVoice.org, was still up. I went there to look and – voilà! It was still there. So, that might explain why there are several different pages online. I will try to “unpublish” the site at MalibuVoice now, but I left it up for a while because it GoDaddy couldn’t publish it at all, I still wanted something for the MOSA board members to be able to refer to while I was trying to get the site published under the proper domain name.

But I will now do a screengrab of my directory on RapidWeaver’s Open Theme for the MOSA site I’ve been trying to publish on Filezilla and RapidWeaver so that you can see that there are no duplicate files there.

I don’t know why there seem to be these duplicate pages floating around out there, but I will say that when I simply tried to republish my original site (that I had published on MalibuVoice.org) at GoDaddy, and it did NOT publish there, I went back to the software and thought that maybe I had done something wrong. Usually I write the websites myself. This one was different and therefore more troublesome. These board members did not want a “written” site. All they wanted was bullet points. And the first version I did for them had been written. The order of the information they had provided seemed to flow better by explaining it differently – in a different order. When the acting president saw that it was NOT in bullet points and that I had turned her bullet points into prose, she asked that it be redone EXACTLY as it had been given to me. So, I did that. However, I had to re-order some of the pages to do that because the photos that seemed to go with one section now were on the wrong pages. This is one reason I recreated the site a few times. Once for them and a second time later, after I had published it on Network Solutions. I had inserted some pages about the biology of the bluffs with a lot of insect, animal, odd plant photos on them. At that time they were interested ONLY in facts and so the unusual formations and biology photos didn’t fit with the information they wanted to convey. I needed to remove those pages and so I put them at the end and marked them “draft” and unchecked the “publish” box at top so that they would not publish.

The reason I numbered the sections was so that I would be clear on the order in which the pages should be presented. Even though in the past I have re-ordered pages in the menu and made subdirectories by just dragging the pages where I wanted them, since 7.0 and up were new to me (I’d last worked with RW when I was using the 6.0 series) I wasn’t sure that you could still do that. People told me that the ordering of the pages was very important.

But the site seemed to publish just fine when it originally was published under MalibuVoice.org. (ALSO HOSTED BY NETWORK SOLUTIONS ON FILEZILLA) And, eventually, it published there after I got help from GoDaddy to point the site to Network Solutions. Originally, Network Solutions said they would take care of pointing the domain name there. They did not tell me I ALSO would have to call GoDaddy and have GoDaddy do that as well. Once I did that, then I could see the revised site online at Network Solutions with the proper Domain Name.

But now we have this new problem. I’m not sure which problems developed where. except for the one Doug mentions – that the IP address is different from the FTP server name. . . So, I guess I might send this whole thread to the tech department at Network Solutions to see if they are able to help organize this.

Admittedly, I am in over my head.

The thing is, Rapid WEaver does make beautiful sites and I hope it never changes. It is relatively unknown, which I love. And I also love having the software on my OWN COMPUTER AND NOT HAVING to rely on the web-creation company’s “web creation tools.” One of my initial sites, which I loved, when I first was learning to create websites, was on iWeb. I pushed the site a bit beyond the services iWeb was intended to provide, and with no real template was able to make remarkable pages. I was amazed how flexible that little program could be.

But when iWeb folded, I thought I could just transfer the sites to other hosts and continue to use their software.

NOPE.

The software stopped working almost right away and even though I had tranferred the sites, I could not update them, so they died.

When you have the creation software on your own computer you are free to move your sites.

Or, so I thought.

By now you all probably are falling asleep and nodding your heads into your screens (as I frequently do), but I thought this background might explain some of the reason for the complexity of everything. When you talk to techies at these companies, you can explain some of the history, but you don’t want to explain too much or you can just hear their eyes glaze over on the other end of the line. I felt it was best to explain what I could. Didn’t they – after all – need to know what had happened before?

Nope. They just need to deal with what is now.

So, I stopped.

Anyway. That’s the LONG of it. Not the short of it. I hope that none of this really was relevant to what we were discussing earlier because I did not want to lead anyone on a wild goose chase… didn’t want to be redundant. It all was complex enough already.

I’m a bit unsure what to do next. Dog is crying to go out, so I’m taking a 20 minute break to take her on her walk. Maybe my brain will be more clear when I get back.

I cannot tell you how grateful I am that all of you have gotten involved with this horrendous mess!!! I do need to get myself out of it.

If organization will help, I’m willing to do whatever is necessary. I hate to keep taking YOUR time because you are on a RapidWeaver site, and maybe this now is back in the court of Network Solutions and the File Manager…

At least I know where the issues are now!!! You have all been so wonderful. And ManDog – what type of “trust” is involved when it comes to having you look at the back end of the site? I appreciate your offer, just don’t realize why “trust” is an issue (that you would want to publish a Malibu site about open space? Ha, ha. I don’t think so.)

I will show you my site menu so that you can see how I thought the site was organized.

Here is the page structure of the site:

Thank you again for your time and suggestions. I am going to read them all again after I get back from the dog walk. Athena (my black German Shepherd Dog) says hello to you all and sends her thanks too.

You can see the whole site’s organization by clicking on the photo. It pops up at you. And if that isn’t enough, there is a page that also is a site map.

P.S. Are you saying Index.html won’t accommodate any plug-ins? I do use plug-ins.

So, the name of the page must have a .XXX that enables you to use plug-ins? That never was in any video that I saw about stacks or blocks, etc.

Some plug ins (not all) run using php scripts and therefore need an up to date php installation on your server. These plug ins will automatically generate an index.php file name. Just don’t change it to index.html

To all –

Thank you, everyone for tolerating my ignorance and trying to help me through this. It is kind of embarrassing, but we all have to start somewhere. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know.

And thank you, L.J. for the info on the plug-ins. Will keep that in mind. I usually don’t change anything that is self-generated (usually not even aware of it.)

Based on everything you’ve all said, I’m going to move forward and see what I can do to save this. One thing I wanted to know, to start, is that IF the menu on my software – what I’m working with and see in front of me as I’m designing the site – shows NO duplicate pages, then the dupes you guys are telling me about must be on the publishing engine (because they’re not visible to me). So, is it possible to go into Filezilla (or wherever the site is published) and remove the extra pages? And re-order them? And also, if I publish to RW’s own engine (which certainly was faster than using FZ and which seems like a great idea to me) can I get into it and do the same type of re-ordering? I can watch and touch FZ, but it didn’t seem like I had access to RW’s publishing engine. Or, do all these publishing engines go to the “same space” out in the ether somewhere? I thought they were all on some giant memory bank or giant hard drive somewhere. I don’t understand where, or how the data is stored. Maybe that’s in a video I haven’t seen.

I ask this because if I am going to have to “clean up” and organize the site, I will need to read something or see something telling me how to do it. It has to be done because the site needs to be published. And if recreating the whole thing isn’t the answer, and this is the only answer, then I need to learn how to do it – and fast!

There is a lot of information in those posts!!

ManofDogs – thank you for giving me information about your company. It is so generous of you to offer to get in and take a look. It is morning now and my brain is fresh and I understand better the issue of trust – if you get in and take a look you have access to EVERYTHING in my computer. Right?

You all are being so kind, and based on all of these conversations everything in my heart and mind is telling me I should go for it and say thank you and be ever so grateful. But – the Jiminy Cricket inside is telling me – “You don’t know this person, Ann! Don’t do it.” So, even though I honestly think it would be fine, my psychological hardware is telling me not to do it. So, for now I’m going to go with that. Dammit!

I will go through all of everyone’s notes this morning and take each recommendation one by one, hoping to make some progress. Will try to avoid any future long notes like this and the ones above.

Please stay with me, you guys!! I know these last notes were long and boring. Promise not to do that anymore.

That RapidWeaver publishing feature is not a full FTP app like FileZilla is so you can’t go in and delete pages, or rename them.

Since you are using RW to build everything, you may want to consider using FZ or the file manager that is with your hosting company to delete what’s in your Htdocs directory and republish all pages in your site once you have them organized within RW.

The assumption here is that you have not published anything outside of RW like images or a htaccess file.

It’s a shame that your hosting company is charging extra for support. In my earlier post, I mentioned that your IP addresses are different for the FTP and DNS, that is not entirely wrong, they can and often will be different. They usually are close.

Must hosting companies give you an IP address to access your site and FTP to it while your site is being set up or transferred. Once your site has moved, they should give you a server name, not an IP address. Unless your plan has static IP address (most don’t), your IP addresses can change.
A typical FTP server name might look like:

ftp.yourdomain.com

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You are confusing the Menu titles with the Page file names / folder names. The former are just what users see in your menu and can be called anything you like. The latter are determined in the “general settings” tab (upper right). There are a couple of ways to do them but the best is to give each page a relevant FOLDER name (without-any-spaces) and leave the FILE NAME as index.html or php.html.

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Doug: So glad you’re still here!!! Love all of you!

This sentence is puzzling to me: “The assumption here is that you have not published anything outside of RW like images or a htaccess file.” Of course I publish images on this website. It is full of banners and page art. I don’t know wha an “htaccess file” is, so I doubt I’ve published that. What you see on malibuopenspace.org is all I’ve done.

Thanks for being sympathetic about the cos of extra support. Good to know that the discrepancy between the IP addresses (FTP and DNS) are different. One of the techies who tried to help solve this problem changed one of them thinking it might help get the site published. I don’t even remember the original one anymore. Sometimes I wonder just how informed and experienced these hired host-company techies actually are. But, I have to trust them.

You guys all seem much more knowledgable. I’m so surprised that a “community” could be so supportive!! This is wonderful. At first I was a little paranoid, thinking that there had to be some RW employees amongst you all, making sure their clients were doing okay – since, apparently there IS NO Rapid Weaver tech support. (You can write to the third-party software creators, but answers sometimes take a few days to get back, and they aren’t really RW employees, just vendors to the company, I’m assuming. So they don’t qualify as tech support.)

Thanks for the info!
:relaxed:

Hey, Dogz!
I understand what you’re saying, but am a little intimidated by the process. Do you mean that when I call up Filezilla, I can drag the files into the order I in which I want them? And can rename the files by just typing a folder name over each name that Filezilla seems to have provided arbitrarily or electronically? Remember, this is all the FIRST TIME for me to be doing this Filezilla tampering. I was afraid to touch anything before for fear I’d mess it all up. And when I click on those folders, usually I get to see various other files or folders within them. Is there a way I can look at them and see WHICH of the duplicate pages I want to keep and which to trash? And how do I actually trash a file on Filezilla? I see, also, a bunch of old folders that I used for a website that I took down… I don’t think they’re all needed on there. Would I, or could I trash any of those? I remember once I was in a real hurry to take one down, so went in there and intentionally altered a file so that it would not publish. But that was several years ago and it was a different site altogether. I don’t even remember what I did. It’s amazing that it can stay on Filezilla even though the site isn’t active anymore. Maybe there’s a book somewhere on all this: Filezilla for Dummies, or some such thing. Thanks, again!

Forget Filezilla in this regard - use RW to name your folders and files. Just go to the general settings as I mentioned and give each page a folder name.

Filezilla is primarily for transferring your web project to a web server NOT for organising your rapidweaver project

Ohhhhhh. . . thanks! Will do now.