Forums (Obsolete)

Member

Stratego - 7/5/2011 12:27:52 PM

Sites are unstable and appear to be reverting to older versions or having random changes

I am running three sites in a single instance of Kentico 5.5 R2 and am getting significant instability from time to time.

Several times the first site I built has changed in production. It may be that it has partially reverted to an older version.

Yesterday the second site changed significantly. What happened is that the page template for a top level page has been replaced by the master page template via inheritance and this was inherited for every page below it.

In addition an image has been replaced on every page of the same set of pages. That is, an image on the top level page has replaced the different images that each of its subsidiary pages had.

This has happened identically to sites one and two on both the development machine which is Vista and SQL Server 2005 and on the production machine which is a VPS with SQL Server 2008. I.e. they are totally different environments.

I suspect that the instability of the two earlier built sites in the production environment yesterday happened as a result of importing the third site. It may be the same case for the test environment.

I developed the third site on the development machine by exporting an existing site and importing it under a new licence and site ID then modifying it.

I then exported it and imported it on the production environment.

The changes I made to the new (third site) did not get reflected in the older sites so the sites are independent but definitely the older sites are unstable and I suspect the import of a new site caused the problems.

Thank you for your help in advance.

Kentico Support

kentico_jurajo - 7/7/2011 1:15:31 AM

RE:Sites are unstable and appear to be reverting to older versions or having random changes

Hi,

What changes were made prior to that situation in any of the sites? What is logged in the Event log - every content change should be logged and also who did the change.

From your description it seems that some page template was edited, which is used across all sites - this change affects all documents using this page template (Page templates concept).

If so, you need to use "different" page templates - meaning at least even the layout will be the same, the code names are different so, changing the page template on site A won't take effect on site B.

Best regards,
Juraj Ondrus

Member

Stratego - 7/7/2011 4:14:07 AM

RE:Sites are unstable and appear to be reverting to older versions or having random changes

Thank you for the reply Juraj.

I have triple checked that all of the Page Templates have a unique code name that is prefixed with the client's name and that each site only uses templates that belong to that site so it is not a case of accidentally having two sites share a template.

I am the only person with access to the CMS and I can see from the logs that I have made no changes apart from repairing the problems that occurred.

The only error in the log that might be relevant is a time out for /CMSModules/ImportExport/SiteManager/ImportSite.aspx on the day that the problem happened.

One of the site problems that has occurred three times to the same site is that the Visibility > Visible check box in a Static HTML web part that has the Web Part Control ID "TopLeftImage" keeps getting checked when I want it unchecked for now on the home page (i.e. not visible).

I do want the same web part visible on another page and wondered if that was the problem but I have just done some testing and it seems that I can have the same static HTML web part visible on some pages and not others. (I even cleared the cache on the server and browser to make sure.)

Actually I was surprised about that. Is that the behaviour that should happen for Static HTML?

The other site has a static html web part with the Web Part Control ID "PhotoAndAddress" so that won't be a problem.

This second site that changed on the same day had a totally different problem - the page template for a top level page changed to Master Page so I had a Master Page embedded in a Master Page.

I fixed that so that it had the correct Page Template which was fine except that the Editable Image part on all the child pages that inherit that template now had the same image as the image in the top menu level page from which they inherited their Page Template.

The child pages definitely each had a correct and unique image in the Editable Image web part before I fixed the parent Page Template problem.

When I imported the new site I logged in to the URL SiteOne/cmssitemanager. That wouldn't have caused the problems would it? I don't need to use a different URL?

Thank you

Kentico Support

kentico_jurajo - 7/7/2011 11:54:53 PM

RE:Sites are unstable and appear to be reverting to older versions or having random changes

Hi,

It is very strange and I have never encountered this before - nothing happens just so, there must be some pattern.

I do want the same web part visible on another page and wondered if that was the problem but I have just done some testing and it seems that I can have the same static HTML web part visible on some pages and not others. (I even cleared the cache on the server and browser to make sure.)

Do the pages have the same page template? If so, the web part setting is shared across page template.

Anyway, from your description everything seems to be OK. But in order to investigate this issue, would it be possible to get the backups of the project folder and database together with the export package so we can follow your steps, reproduce and investigate the issue (you can send the backups to support@kentico.com, or links to download them).

Thank you.

Best regards,
Juraj Ondrus

Member

Stratego - 7/8/2011 5:00:21 AM

RE:Sites are unstable and appear to be reverting to older versions or having random changes

Thank you for your posting Juraj.

Don't worry about reproducing and investigating further this stage as it may have been something I have done somehow inadvertently although I can't think what.

I will contact you if it happens again, this time with more knowledge of the events that lead up to any change and with confidence it was not caused by me making changes.

The two pages that both have the Static HTML Web Part with the same Web Part ID do have different Page Templates and I now know from your post that I can have one ticked as Visible and the other not and all should be fine.

I will just keep an eye on them for now and come back to you if it repeats.

For the second site I will do he same - just contact you if the master page template issue re-occurs.

Thank you very much

S