Lately what I have been creating in RW editing is not what is showing up in the browser.
When I create a page in RW and look at it in preview everything is fine.
When I look at the page in either Safari or Chrome it bears no relationship with what I see in RW.
Sometimes I will click on one page in the navigation menu and it will take me to a completely different web page that I previously deleted from the site. Often times it seems to have something to do with ordinal position of the page. The new number three page on my site will somehow show up with what was once number three in page position.
I have disabled Robot Meta Tags on all of these pages.
I have googled this topic several times and come up with archived RapidWeaver Community responses that say it has to do with deleting pages off my server (Chillidog).
Where would I go to learn about the mechanics of deleting pages with FTP?
Also: Can anybody tell me why my site is being served with these zombie pages. I thought I had already deleted them?
Also check if your pages have .html or .php as the file type.
By default RW sets all pages as html but some stacks will change them to php in order to function correctly. However, web servers will render html pages before php ones. So you might be seeing old html pages on your site rather than newer php ones? If so go in to your web hosting and remove the manually
Most hosting companies have a file manager of some kind that works similar to finder. All ftp clients like transmit or FileZilla allow you to delete files from the server.
Once you publish something, RapidWeaver will not delete anything from the server. You need to manage deletion yourself. This might seem like a real issue, but it’s really not, It’s a good thing.
Since RapidWeaver deletes nothing, once the page is published, it’s out there until you delete it. Any reference to that URL will serve that page. If you delete the page, then any reference to that URL will return a 404 (not found) error.
If you are deleting pages that are currently on a ”production” site, it’s best practice to do a redirect to the replacement page. That way any links to the page(bookmarks, search engines, other sites and social media) will go to the replacement page.
If it’s a development or test site, then you can probably get into the habit of deleting everything after backing up.
“By default RW sets all pages as html but some stacks will change them to php in order to function correctly. However, web servers will render html pages before php ones. So you might be seeing old html pages on your site rather than newer php ones?”
I’m not exactly sure what the difference between html & php pages so I will do some research here before I ask more questions about this.
Doug Bennett:
I downloaded FileZilla and will dig in here as well.
What you said about how " Any reference to that URL will serve that page" might clear up a conundrum I have had since almost day one.
I am primarily experimenting with a format that references pages entitled Kitchen 1, Kitchen 2, Kitchen 3 etc. As a consequence of this naming convention I have published and re-published different content using the same names over and over again. I could see how this might confuse a server.
Something else I also do is disable Robo Meta Tags. This by default un-checks “index this page” option. The word “index” might provide another clue?
Fortunately all these pages are just for practice. When I get something that seems to not break I will see if I can hire a concierge service at Chillidog to help make sure my old site migrates successfully to my new one.
Thanks so much to everybody. I will try to keep my rabbit hole type questions to a minimum.
Thanks Scott. That’s the same thing Greg at ChilliDog Hosting told me.
He also corroborated what others said about the root cause of my zombie pages being that I had an index.html and index.php file published on the same page.
I opened up each file and found two instances of this.
I wasn’t sure which one to delete so I deleted the index.php.
It depends on what’s on the page, if it needs php like a form or something, the next time you publish it will publish php again. At least you will know to delete the .html if that happens.
So if it consistently shows up with both index.html AND index.php it is because the page required php.
In that case I would delete the index.html, correct?
Is it because of the singularity of one URL page being served at a time that both html & php can coexist on the same website?
That is correct, some pages(not necessarily the whole site) may need php to function. If that is he case RW will make the page php.
What happens is; a page gets publish as html, then, something gets added to the page that needs php, the page gets published again as php with the html page still there.
