Two nights in a row, my umbraco 4.5.1 site has silently unpublished all its pages.
The site http://saversetter.com behaves normally for the most part, except when I try to visit it after a few hours idle (I don't get many hits) it shows me the "Still Work To Do" page, and I have to logon to umbraco and republish the node and its children.
Republish entire site from Content node does not appear to do anything, is this option hooked up?
A couple days ago, when creating the site, I was editing doctypes, but not recently, so I have no suspicions why my entire site keeps turning itself off.
I don't see any other reports of this behavior, so I'll chalk it up as another umbraco bug limited to myself, but this one is serious enough to mention in case anyone else does experience it. I don't have enough info for an issue at codeplex, which is down anyway.
Any suggestions on how to implement a control that will alert me when the site unpublishes ANYTHING?
here is a list of all events, the BeforeUnPublish should do the trick for you. However if the whole content tree gets unpublished over night I don't know if that actually gets called. Did you have a look through the logs if you can see anything suspicious?
I had a similar problem where a couple of pages with quite a lot of sub nodes were unpublished by magic, it all happened at the same time, however I suggest some of our writers did something they shouldn't have...
I do a whole lot of monkeying with my sites, and could've done something to cause the problem, for sure. I just wish I knew what it was, and I can't place anything in the past 24 hours or so that could be blamed for second occurrence. I do have the logs to look at still.
Thanks for event list, that is handy. If I pursue it, a more generic email event notifier tool would be more useful than something so focused on my problem (now that I begin to consider it). I should check existing packages.
At any length, thanks for suggestions!
EDIT:
So, it just happened again, since I replied. And I hadn't done anything, I mean, I just now decided to look into it, and my site was unpublished again. Content documents have no links in their properties tab, although they do have a last published date and the unpublish button....so, I won't keep reporting in, but this sucks.
Site was ok for several days, then unpublished itself again. I don't know what I searched for last time, but this time I found several other threads with the same issue:
While some of those threads have marked "answers", they actually have no /solutions/. I thought it was isolated to me and 4.5.1, but some of these reports are several months old.
As for suggestions (keep 'em coming, I'll try it!) in the threads; My permissions / Security is correct and reaffirmed. The umbraco.config file is in App_Data, and a forced recreate has been done. We'll see if that helps, but the old & new files were identical, so not likely.
I just found that final thread linked. I am going to see if any of my content, xslt, or templates could lead to bad xml in umbraco.config. All my code validates, at least once delivered to a visitor. This includes content as well, as far as I know--I usually check a page on completion. Since saversetter.com is so small, and I have the links on the pages, I will validate every page right now.......bbl
Looking at the logs, I really don't know what is normal. But it seems like umbraco is restarting every couple minutes, everytime it has to do anything. And this appears to be happening on numerous installations.
I think my problem is related to the bug mentioned in this thread:
I also have hyphens in some Document Type names, which I thought I knew better than to do. (That will be a pain to undo, having to recompile & recreate packages by hand again)
My umbraco.config file is not valid xml, simply because the DTD included at the beginning is incomplete or invalid. Why is that there? It declares elements for every document type, whether they are used in content or not. But it doesn't declare the 'root' or any of the other elements that correspond to properties of doctypes. I do not know if this is related to my pressing issue, but it sure seems fishy. I think the DTD is fairly new addition(???). I would prefer everything related to my site, even internally, be valid. Can we simply not include the partial DTD that is being inserted into umbraco.config?
I am debating trying to get "the latest build" going, and seeing if has addressed the issue. But I don't think I have the time to create another website, just to confirm it is broken. I put all web development on hold waiting for 4.5. I like umbraco so much, but I can't keep putting stuff on hold while it gets its stuff together. My erratically unpublishing site problem aside, the hyphens in names issue is an example of the numerous little things that can just break a site. ah nevermind. If these things bothered anyone but me they'd have been fixed.
After getting a .NET 3.5 version using most of the files from most recent nightly, the site does seem to have settled down on restarting and Lucene / Examine appears to behaving better, but still has errors in log. And one site picked up the richtext-editor timeout bug (which I have described elsewhere) which as far as I know can only be removed by a total wipe.
All that would evidently be unrelated to my problem, and the problems experienced by the original posters of the threads I linked above. Other testing & elimination has ruled out actual Content on the site.
What remains is something about my implementation. I have refined, over years, a fairly powerful umbraco implementation. One that until recently was robust. The sites experiencing these issues are bare umbraco installations, plus the log viewer package, the config editor package, and these two unreleased packages:
So, if anyone wants to give replication a shot, you should be able to do it. The packages need to be installed in that order, Landiing-Site then Knobsack. Then create an Entrypoint content document, and optionally other content. After viewing the entrypoint to confirm it is published, give the site a few hours, mess around with the datatypes, doctypes, and stuff if you have a moment, and see if when you wake up in the morning the site still is published.
Now, I doubt that'll happen. And I'd rather be marking my progress solving problems like this on my on website...unfortunately, umbraco wouldn't keep it published. Which I see is not an issue with the install at our.umbraco.org, where the Delete thread from forum option fails silently. Oh to have your troubles.
EDIT: My next step will be a site without the Knobsack (think Autosort++) package, using only the first Landing Site (think Runway++) package. FYI
Fix for constant replacing of umbraco.config was an illusion. I don't know where it is in the "nightly build" but it is somewhere that didn't make it into my new scratch site. I had turned off caching on the other site.
Site restarts about once a minute, has only two static pages.
Timeout when trying to edit content traced to umbraco's handling of CSS for richtext--any styles added to be available in the editor will cause a database call, apparently, so if you have two richtext editors on two tabs of a document type, with a dozen styles available to each, whenever you view a node in the content tree you're making approximately 24 excess db calls, which, and this may be my hosting, can take so long that things time out.
CSS rules for use in richtext editors can be created two ways:
Right click on an existing stylesheet and create a rule, and include that rule in your TinyMCE datatype.
Or
Import as part of a package.
My rules are almost always imported with a package. (I had to edit package.xml by hand, and it still can't hook the styles to the datatype automatically). If rules are imported, they exist only in the database. If the first method is used, the rules exist in two places, in the text of the CSS file, and the database.
When the rules exist in both file & db, Content node rendering is improved somewhat, but not to the point of when No rules are included with TinyMCE. BUT, trying to edit the rules in the Settings section (again, with the rules defined twice) causes a loong lookup each rule. BUT when the rules exist in only the database, it times out when rendering a content node with a richtext datatype property, but in the Settings section is very snappy in response.
If that all sounds confusing to you, imagine me having to figure it out. Anyway, all current signs point to Umbraco and its relationship with CSS and TinyMCE as the underlying issue. Or it could be the unfixed constant cache refreshing.
Now my choice is redo this whole area (of umbraco the application), which has caused me no end of trouble, or bail on richtext editors, or richtext editors with rules (what's the point? Macros? Inserting macros in richtext crashes chrome flash, so...), or umbraco. I know you all won't miss me, but I'm not sure I could go without umbraco.
Anyway, since this is only confusing and not helping, I'll quit with the updates. You won't want my donnetnuke review anyway.
EDIT: I can't resist one final speculation: the CSS probems (which cascade themselves) stem from Culture mismanagement, one manifestation being inconsistent line endings. But commas and periods in CSS are pretty important.
My site stopped unpublishing itself, but it is hard to know why at this point, after all that I did. I know you've tried some of these things already, but I'll just try to think of everything I tried that could have affected it. The actual site was completely wiped, db destroyed, and a new install based on a nightly build was created. [EDIT: This wipeout was done AFTER I had stopped the unpublishing, in attempt to fix other problem] My remote environment is .NET 3.5, and I'm unclear on how to summarize my "Trust". I have Full Trust, for all intents and purposes, within my httpdocs folder where umbraco is installed, but I am on a shared sever.
The 3.5 Nightly isn't always as recent as the 4.0, so I take the umbraco.dlls from the 4.0, and the microsoft,iron python, iron ruby, lucene, etc. dlls from the most recent 3.5 build. I believe when I was experiencing the unpublishing I was using a custom web.config, with my own settings. I have since returned to the config direct from the 3.5 nightly, and will tweak it once I have things working--if you are using an old standby config, consider using a new default one for the time being.
I had two undesired behaviors I tended to associate together, but now one, constant restarting, remains, while I no longer experience the unpublishing (not lately). The other key observation is that I was, at the time, able to reproduce the unpublishing on a local installation, while I have never been able to induce a local install to restart three times every two minutes like my remote deployment is doing. So, it is hard for me to accept, but these two behaviors may be unrelated--I'll try and focus on unpublishing.
I am almost certain that my unpublishing stopped when I cleaned up my xslt,masterpages,css, & config folders. Loading the files into Visual Studio or Notepad++, altering slightly (Notepad++ doesn't remove NPCs outright like VS seems to, you have to delete the "?" placeholders), and resaving, then deleting old files from remote server and ftping new ones (overwrite using Windows Explorer ftp: sometimes doesn't take).
The masterpages in particular are susceptible to non-printing character infiltration. I know this sounds like a lunatic seeing things, but I assure you, I am not imagining them. I may be imagining that they are responsible for our troubles, but I'm not imagining the NPCs in templates. They are introduced by umbraco. I don't know if it is the template editor that is buggy, or umbraco (suspect umbraco because of umbraco.config never seeing an editor, and templates installed via package also have them).
But here's the thing, I eliminated all of them from my files, but still, if I load umbraco.config direct from a save by umbraco application, into Visual Studio, sometimes it will have an error resembling "The first token "Text" is invalid" and there's a red squiggle under the xml declaration. This is indicating an NPC as first character of the document. technically invalid, but most robust applications can handle it, so those methods that can't are hard to ferret out.
Sorry, not much help. I'll try and remember if there was something specific. But my advice is to work with the most recent nightlies, new default web.config, and all post-installation text files, whether from package or created anew, should be edited and saved outside umbraco.
I found an installation of umbraco that was still unpublishing.
I repubbed site from the Content node, and everything reappeared.
When I edited the root entry node, and tried to republish it, it refused! A mandatory property was unset. This property HAD to have been set before, or I wouldn't have been able to ever publish in the first place. Somehow, maybe something I did (I haven't touched this install in days, not sure where I was with it), a mandatory property became unset, which could theoretically have correlation to the unpublishing of the node in question.
I'm not sure if it means anything, but this is the first time I've seen anything out of the ordinary--usually, you know, the site just unpublishes, with no record or remnant of the event.
It may not be mandatory that the property be mandatory--that's probably is just why it was so evident this time, when a previously published page no longer was publishable.
In the absence of solutions, I hope you don't mind speculation and observation!
I examined the mandatory property on my content type, and discovered that the 'Integer' render control was using a database datatype of 'NText', should be 'Integer'. So, if you haven't, check every datatype used in properties on your content (or otherwise?), and see if they are using the type the database expects (you catch my drift).
EDIT: Me and my edits.....anyway. Most of my tests employ a site framework package including custom datatypes, mostly replicating standard ones, but meant to be ready for the future. Many of the datatypes (booleans & numeric particularly) were rendering fine, but using an incorrect database datatype.
Site Unpublishing Itself
Two nights in a row, my umbraco 4.5.1 site has silently unpublished all its pages.
The site http://saversetter.com behaves normally for the most part, except when I try to visit it after a few hours idle (I don't get many hits) it shows me the "Still Work To Do" page, and I have to logon to umbraco and republish the node and its children.
Republish entire site from Content node does not appear to do anything, is this option hooked up?
A couple days ago, when creating the site, I was editing doctypes, but not recently, so I have no suspicions why my entire site keeps turning itself off.
I don't see any other reports of this behavior, so I'll chalk it up as another umbraco bug limited to myself, but this one is serious enough to mention in case anyone else does experience it. I don't have enough info for an issue at codeplex, which is down anyway.
Any suggestions on how to implement a control that will alert me when the site unpublishes ANYTHING?
Hi xander,
here is a list of all events, the BeforeUnPublish should do the trick for you. However if the whole content tree gets unpublished over night I don't know if that actually gets called. Did you have a look through the logs if you can see anything suspicious?
I had a similar problem where a couple of pages with quite a lot of sub nodes were unpublished by magic, it all happened at the same time, however I suggest some of our writers did something they shouldn't have...
Sascha
I do a whole lot of monkeying with my sites, and could've done something to cause the problem, for sure. I just wish I knew what it was, and I can't place anything in the past 24 hours or so that could be blamed for second occurrence. I do have the logs to look at still.
Thanks for event list, that is handy. If I pursue it, a more generic email event notifier tool would be more useful than something so focused on my problem (now that I begin to consider it). I should check existing packages.
At any length, thanks for suggestions!
EDIT:
So, it just happened again, since I replied. And I hadn't done anything, I mean, I just now decided to look into it, and my site was unpublished again. Content documents have no links in their properties tab, although they do have a last published date and the unpublish button....so, I won't keep reporting in, but this sucks.
Site was ok for several days, then unpublished itself again. I don't know what I searched for last time, but this time I found several other threads with the same issue:
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/using/ui-questions/5073-Node-auto-unpublishexpire
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/general/8025-Umbraco-seems-to-'unpublish'-at-random
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/general/3886-Content-node(s)-that-seem-to-unpublish-themselves
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/core/general/8324-Lucene-unpublishing-content
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/6209-Umbraco-Keeps-Unpublish-Automatic!
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/10059-Keep-getting-no-pages-Looks-like-there's-still-work-to-do-error
While some of those threads have marked "answers", they actually have no /solutions/. I thought it was isolated to me and 4.5.1, but some of these reports are several months old.
As for suggestions (keep 'em coming, I'll try it!) in the threads; My permissions / Security is correct and reaffirmed. The umbraco.config file is in App_Data, and a forced recreate has been done. We'll see if that helps, but the old & new files were identical, so not likely.
I just found that final thread linked. I am going to see if any of my content, xslt, or templates could lead to bad xml in umbraco.config. All my code validates, at least once delivered to a visitor. This includes content as well, as far as I know--I usually check a page on completion. Since saversetter.com is so small, and I have the links on the pages, I will validate every page right now.......bbl
Looking at the logs, I really don't know what is normal. But it seems like umbraco is restarting every couple minutes, everytime it has to do anything. And this appears to be happening on numerous installations.
I think my problem is related to the bug mentioned in this thread:
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/ourumb-dev-forum/bugs/11127-Strange-behaviour-with-umbracoconfig-on-451
I also have hyphens in some Document Type names, which I thought I knew better than to do. (That will be a pain to undo, having to recompile & recreate packages by hand again)
http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/autofolders/version-20-feedback/10742-Cannot-have-'-'-in-doctype-name
My umbraco.config file is not valid xml, simply because the DTD included at the beginning is incomplete or invalid. Why is that there? It declares elements for every document type, whether they are used in content or not. But it doesn't declare the 'root' or any of the other elements that correspond to properties of doctypes. I do not know if this is related to my pressing issue, but it sure seems fishy. I think the DTD is fairly new addition(???). I would prefer everything related to my site, even internally, be valid. Can we simply not include the partial DTD that is being inserted into umbraco.config?
I am debating trying to get "the latest build" going, and seeing if has addressed the issue. But I don't think I have the time to create another website, just to confirm it is broken. I put all web development on hold waiting for 4.5. I like umbraco so much, but I can't keep putting stuff on hold while it gets its stuff together. My erratically unpublishing site problem aside, the hyphens in names issue is an example of the numerous little things that can just break a site. ah nevermind. If these things bothered anyone but me they'd have been fixed.
After getting a .NET 3.5 version using most of the files from most recent nightly, the site does seem to have settled down on restarting and Lucene / Examine appears to behaving better, but still has errors in log. And one site picked up the richtext-editor timeout bug (which I have described elsewhere) which as far as I know can only be removed by a total wipe.
All that would evidently be unrelated to my problem, and the problems experienced by the original posters of the threads I linked above. Other testing & elimination has ruled out actual Content on the site.
What remains is something about my implementation. I have refined, over years, a fairly powerful umbraco implementation. One that until recently was robust. The sites experiencing these issues are bare umbraco installations, plus the log viewer package, the config editor package, and these two unreleased packages:
http://feebdack.com/storage/[Landing Site] Website Framework 2.0.zip
http://feebdack.com/storage/[Knobsack] Modular Content 2.0.zip
So, if anyone wants to give replication a shot, you should be able to do it. The packages need to be installed in that order, Landiing-Site then Knobsack. Then create an Entrypoint content document, and optionally other content. After viewing the entrypoint to confirm it is published, give the site a few hours, mess around with the datatypes, doctypes, and stuff if you have a moment, and see if when you wake up in the morning the site still is published.
Now, I doubt that'll happen. And I'd rather be marking my progress solving problems like this on my on website...unfortunately, umbraco wouldn't keep it published. Which I see is not an issue with the install at our.umbraco.org, where the Delete thread from forum option fails silently. Oh to have your troubles.
EDIT: My next step will be a site without the Knobsack (think Autosort++) package, using only the first Landing Site (think Runway++) package. FYI
Fix for constant replacing of umbraco.config was an illusion. I don't know where it is in the "nightly build" but it is somewhere that didn't make it into my new scratch site. I had turned off caching on the other site.
Site restarts about once a minute, has only two static pages.
Timeout when trying to edit content traced to umbraco's handling of CSS for richtext--any styles added to be available in the editor will cause a database call, apparently, so if you have two richtext editors on two tabs of a document type, with a dozen styles available to each, whenever you view a node in the content tree you're making approximately 24 excess db calls, which, and this may be my hosting, can take so long that things time out.
CSS rules for use in richtext editors can be created two ways:
Right click on an existing stylesheet and create a rule, and include that rule in your TinyMCE datatype.
Or
Import as part of a package.
My rules are almost always imported with a package. (I had to edit package.xml by hand, and it still can't hook the styles to the datatype automatically). If rules are imported, they exist only in the database. If the first method is used, the rules exist in two places, in the text of the CSS file, and the database.
When the rules exist in both file & db, Content node rendering is improved somewhat, but not to the point of when No rules are included with TinyMCE. BUT, trying to edit the rules in the Settings section (again, with the rules defined twice) causes a loong lookup each rule. BUT when the rules exist in only the database, it times out when rendering a content node with a richtext datatype property, but in the Settings section is very snappy in response.
If that all sounds confusing to you, imagine me having to figure it out. Anyway, all current signs point to Umbraco and its relationship with CSS and TinyMCE as the underlying issue. Or it could be the unfixed constant cache refreshing.
Now my choice is redo this whole area (of umbraco the application), which has caused me no end of trouble, or bail on richtext editors, or richtext editors with rules (what's the point? Macros? Inserting macros in richtext crashes chrome flash, so...), or umbraco. I know you all won't miss me, but I'm not sure I could go without umbraco.
Anyway, since this is only confusing and not helping, I'll quit with the updates. You won't want my donnetnuke review anyway.
EDIT: I can't resist one final speculation: the CSS probems (which cascade themselves) stem from Culture mismanagement, one manifestation being inconsistent line endings. But commas and periods in CSS are pretty important.
nevermind
I've having the same unpublishing published site problem.
it is busting my b@lls!
I don't have ann css rulesfor the editors, so i don't think that could be the problem - if that's what you are suggesting?
What db are you using? are you in medium trust?
hey xander lih, in another post you said you have fixed this... have you? help! :(
Hi Magic,
My site stopped unpublishing itself, but it is hard to know why at this point, after all that I did. I know you've tried some of these things already, but I'll just try to think of everything I tried that could have affected it. The actual site was completely wiped, db destroyed, and a new install based on a nightly build was created. [EDIT: This wipeout was done AFTER I had stopped the unpublishing, in attempt to fix other problem] My remote environment is .NET 3.5, and I'm unclear on how to summarize my "Trust". I have Full Trust, for all intents and purposes, within my httpdocs folder where umbraco is installed, but I am on a shared sever.
The 3.5 Nightly isn't always as recent as the 4.0, so I take the umbraco.dlls from the 4.0, and the microsoft,iron python, iron ruby, lucene, etc. dlls from the most recent 3.5 build. I believe when I was experiencing the unpublishing I was using a custom web.config, with my own settings. I have since returned to the config direct from the 3.5 nightly, and will tweak it once I have things working--if you are using an old standby config, consider using a new default one for the time being.
I had two undesired behaviors I tended to associate together, but now one, constant restarting, remains, while I no longer experience the unpublishing (not lately). The other key observation is that I was, at the time, able to reproduce the unpublishing on a local installation, while I have never been able to induce a local install to restart three times every two minutes like my remote deployment is doing. So, it is hard for me to accept, but these two behaviors may be unrelated--I'll try and focus on unpublishing.
I am almost certain that my unpublishing stopped when I cleaned up my xslt,masterpages,css, & config folders. Loading the files into Visual Studio or Notepad++, altering slightly (Notepad++ doesn't remove NPCs outright like VS seems to, you have to delete the "?" placeholders), and resaving, then deleting old files from remote server and ftping new ones (overwrite using Windows Explorer ftp: sometimes doesn't take).
The masterpages in particular are susceptible to non-printing character infiltration. I know this sounds like a lunatic seeing things, but I assure you, I am not imagining them. I may be imagining that they are responsible for our troubles, but I'm not imagining the NPCs in templates. They are introduced by umbraco. I don't know if it is the template editor that is buggy, or umbraco (suspect umbraco because of umbraco.config never seeing an editor, and templates installed via package also have them).
But here's the thing, I eliminated all of them from my files, but still, if I load umbraco.config direct from a save by umbraco application, into Visual Studio, sometimes it will have an error resembling "The first token "Text" is invalid" and there's a red squiggle under the xml declaration. This is indicating an NPC as first character of the document. technically invalid, but most robust applications can handle it, so those methods that can't are hard to ferret out.
Sorry, not much help. I'll try and remember if there was something specific. But my advice is to work with the most recent nightlies, new default web.config, and all post-installation text files, whether from package or created anew, should be edited and saved outside umbraco.
Hey,
I found an installation of umbraco that was still unpublishing.
I repubbed site from the Content node, and everything reappeared.
When I edited the root entry node, and tried to republish it, it refused! A mandatory property was unset. This property HAD to have been set before, or I wouldn't have been able to ever publish in the first place. Somehow, maybe something I did (I haven't touched this install in days, not sure where I was with it), a mandatory property became unset, which could theoretically have correlation to the unpublishing of the node in question.
I'm not sure if it means anything, but this is the first time I've seen anything out of the ordinary--usually, you know, the site just unpublishes, with no record or remnant of the event.
It may not be mandatory that the property be mandatory--that's probably is just why it was so evident this time, when a previously published page no longer was publishable.
In the absence of solutions, I hope you don't mind speculation and observation!
I examined the mandatory property on my content type, and discovered that the 'Integer' render control was using a database datatype of 'NText', should be 'Integer'. So, if you haven't, check every datatype used in properties on your content (or otherwise?), and see if they are using the type the database expects (you catch my drift).
EDIT: Me and my edits.....anyway. Most of my tests employ a site framework package including custom datatypes, mostly replicating standard ones, but meant to be ready for the future. Many of the datatypes (booleans & numeric particularly) were rendering fine, but using an incorrect database datatype.
is working on a reply...