One I don’t understand, but only appears to affect a couple of my projects so far.
My main machine for RW is a 13" MacBook Air mid 2012, with 8GB and 512GB storage. I am now on Mac OS Sierra 10.12.1 and RW 7.1.7 and Stacks 3.2.4
On my largest site, which has approx 350 pages, I was managing to publish without too many dramas. Until the move to Sierra 12.1 and the move from RW7.1.5 to 7 last week. The theme on this project was Themeflood’s Summit 2.1 and the host is GoDaddy (yes, I know, but I have had no issues with them in the last couple of years)
On Thursday last week I added one page, by duplicating another and amending it (which I have done many times in the past). I also made two small amendments to two other pages. The end result was all the menus had to be updated, because of the added page and that amounted to some 5,400 files to upload. Not a great problem and had taken about twenty minutes, the last time I had made a similar change on the Sunday before.
This time the upload fails after getting to roughly 150-160 files (never on the same file, or number), telling me that it is unable to upload the site.
In an effort to understand what was happening, I created a small micro-site in a sub directory, using the same theme and a single home page, with stacks and couple of sub pages with only stacks markdown. This came to 150+ files and also failed at about the 140 file mark. Again never at the same file, or number of files.
I know that I can and will use Transmit to upload, but I want to understand what on earth is going on, as I still prefer to use RW’s inbuilt FTP client. Mad, I know.
RapidWeaver 7.1 introduced faster opening and publishing — great new features — but they put a new burden on plugins. It means nearly everything is threaded or all at once. For most plugins this fine, great even! But plugins that interact with more than one page, like Stacks and PlusKit — this is a very big deal.
I have several Stacks on each page, I also have Partials on each page containing graphics. In fact I use partials a lot. Plenty of scope there for things to get confused on a slow uplink?
Does the site use PlusKit (it wasn’t mentioned in the original post). If not, then the simple answer is: no, it’s not the same thing mentioned in my blog post – it’s probably something different.
Can you successfully export to a local directory? Can you successfully upload that content to your host with another FTP program (just for testing – not as a permanent solution).
If you are using PlusKit – trying disabling it (for now) and see if you can export without it.
If you can export locally – but the problem happens just during FTP – I’d probably recommend contact RMS. I think there are FTP logging that they can enable to help figure out problems there – but I’m afraid I don’t know any more detail than that.
I did have PlusKit on there, but when the publishing issue started, I removed it, so it isn’t that.
I can Export the site locally (and have) and use Transmit to upload the site (and have done), so it is clearly some sort of ftp issue. I have reported the issue to support and look forward to an answer.
It is still a complete pain in the butt and I share others frustrations getting it to work.
OK, since the problem lies just in the FTP end of the publish, I’m afraid I’m probably out of my depth of expertise to help. Plugins are mostly firewalled away from the FTP process.
Once the FTP begins, I’m a user just like you, and don’t know any more secrets.
As a user, though, I have found that fiddling with the Publishing settings has yielded better and worse results which vary widely based on the host you’re FTP-ing to.
The FTP, FTPS, and SFTP settings
The “Mode” settings (Extended Passive, Passive, and Active)
And probably the most important: The number of connections seems to default to 6 – but my older hosting account doesn’t seem to support that – If I set it to more than 3 it just hangs. On other accounts I can get to 5. You could try setting that to 1 just to see if it changes anything.
OK, and with that… I think I"m completely out of ideas… so I’ll leave you in the capable hans of RMS support folks.
Thanks for your suggestions, I have tried everything you suggested, except for the FTP,FTPS and SFTP settings, so I will try that. If that doesn’t work I will just have to pin my hopes on Support.
In the meantime I am getting on with life and ftp’ing with Transmit…
After more than a week of hell, at a time when my site constantly needed updating, I had reached the point where I was not sleeping well at night.
This was clearly ridiculous so, although I was not getting any closer to working out what was the real cause of my publishing issues, I decided to move my site to another host. After a small false start and thanks to help from @barchard the site is running better than ever at Chillidog. Best thing of the lot, is that I am now able to use RW7 publishing without any issues. Hoo-flaming-ray!
So, to all those others struggling to publish with RW7, just bear in mind that it is not necessarily always RW at fault.
That is interesting. In my opinion if a setup passes the connection Test in publishing setup then publishing/uploading should work. Period. If the test is not “robust” enough to detect problems then there should be an “extended connection test” that does a “real world” test to find potential problems.
That being said… many of my publishing crashes come way before the actual connection stage (exporting pages, etc) But having resolved myself to exporting to local folder and ftp’ing my files I don’t have an issue. In fact, I prefer to export and upload with my own tool.
that’s exactly what I’d do.