Web Site Publisher

FAQ: What rules does Web Site Publisher use to decide whether or not a site needs publishing?

Web Site Publisher uses a number of rules to establish whether or not a web site needs publishing.

• If a web site has never been published then it needs publishing.
• If any files in the web site have a date stamp which is more recent that the last publish date then those files have been updated and the web site will need publishing. WSP will take into account any files which it has been told to ignore or exclude when considering file dates.
• If any folders in the web site have a date stamp which is more recent that the last published date then files may have been added or deleted from the folder, so the web site will need publishing. WSP will take into account any folders which it has been told to ignore or exclude when considering the date stamp of folders. (The number of files alone cannot be used to determine whether files have been added or deleted because that would not catch the situation where a file was deleted from one folder and added to another.)

These rules are applied automatically by Web Site Publisher when it scans the local files of a web site to determine whether or not it needs publishing.

This typically means that if a web site is moved from one PC to another (say when migrating to a new PC) and the configuration for that website saved and imported on the new PC then Web Site Publisher will consider that the web site needs publishing even though nothing might actually have been changed. This is because whilst copying of the source of a web site from one PC to another will typically preserve the dates of the files, it will reset the dates of the folders and Web Site Publisher considers the dates of the folders when making a call as to whether a web site needs publishing.