WordPress-Content Archiving Process
- Thomas Rose-Bolden
This information relates to resources or news articles. To remove an entire page, please request support. For unpublishing module content (page sections), see this reference: WordPress-Module Permissionsarchived
Before you archive, unpublish or delete content, please check for any incoming links and unlink or change them so they don’t break after you take something down.
If you don’t know how, refer to this:
WordPress-Checking for Incoming Links - Monsido
2. Next, decide if you will be unpublishing or deleting the item.
When it’s best to unpublish:
The item may need to be published again at some point in the future
The item needs to be fixed and republished at a later date
The item is owned by someone else and you don’t feel comfortable deleting it permanently
When it’s best to delete:
The item has an obvious expiration date (external event, dates or deadlines, etc.)
The item is a duplicate of something already on the site
Item was created by mistake
The item will never be needed by anyone on the site again
3. You may want to save a copy of the article or resource for later. We have a Sharepoint folder available where you can save things. You can create a new folder for a particular section or just save the file in this main folder:
You may also want to save the item in your department’s own drive or folder if you already have a process for this type of work; saving the content is optional but can be useful for future reference in some cases.
4. There is no automatic way to “save a copy” in DNN, but you could do one of the following:
Take a screenshot of the page
Copy/paste the actual content into a Word doc
Export the entire page as a PDF (use your browser to do this)
5. Go into the edit settings of the article or resource. Options for both unpublishing or deleting are available at the bottom of the item.
After you have unpublished/deleted something, please check Monsido after a couple of days to make sure that broken links didn’t show up as a result of this action. In some cases this can happen even if you’ve initially removed links to the item, so it’s always good to double check.
FAQs about Content Archiving
Q: If I remove a page from the menu, can the user still access it?
A: A user can still access any page on the site unless it is hidden through permissions. If the page is being indexed by Google, it will come up in search results; users may also have bookmarked the page.
Q: Is it bad to keep old pages if they are hidden from end-users?
A: Unless we have a plan to put content back up, such as seasonal content that is made available every year at a given time, keeping old pages on the site just causes additional bloat and can incur larger hosting fees. The website should not be used as an archive system; Sharepoint is the proper place to store old content that will never be made live again.
Q: What is the difference between “unpublishing” something and “deleting” it?
A: Resources can be “unpublished” in Easy DNN News by content editors, which allows the content to be visible later by simply switching the toggle to “published.” Deleting the resource is final.
Q: What does the end user see if they click on a link to an unpublished article?
A: The end-user will see a message that the resource is not available/has been removed (it appears as an error to the user).