Break the variation in Sharepoint

Most of the Sharepoint Developers/Content Editors facing below problem in Variation feature of MOSS.

Publishing a page in the variation source site overwrites all contents in the target site

If below variation settings are ON.

• Automatically create site and page variations


• Recreate a new target page when the source page is republished.


• Update Web Part changes to target pages when variation source page update is propagated.

Case is like this,

First time when we create page XYZ in source variation(English) this page will automatically get created on target variation site(French). Then content editor add some content to this page and publish it. That contents will also get reflected to target page but that is not in French because Sharepoint will not do the task of content translation. This time content editor edit content on French site and publish it.

Now everything is working fine till new change.

After some days there is one minor change in English site. Hence content editor do that change and publish it. Now disaster came into his life.

All the contents of French page get overwritten by English page.

Now we will talk about the workarounds.

1: Temporary solution

Go to the target page version history and restore current published major version.

2: Permanent solution

Attempt this once page created on first time. Delete target(French) page when it automatically created. Create new page with same name in target(French). This will break variation link between source and variation page. Add/Update the content and publish it.

By doing this you will see an error in Variation log

An error occurred during page variation creation. A page already exists at the target location:

Don't worry...! This error is coming because we breaked variation link. This will happen on every update on source page.

Cheers! Now enjoy content editing.

Benefits of detaching publishing page from page layout

In the publishing feature of Sharepoint every page must be derived from the page layout. This page layout actually decide the look and feel plus contents of the page, so if u use one layout more than a page then it is difficult to manage the look and feel because if u make change in page layout then this changes are automatically reflected on all the pages which using this page layout.
Sharepoint designer has given one nice functionality to detach the page from it's layout. By detaching page from it's layout, page got a following benefits.

• All the content fields and page fields can be used on the page.


• Use any designs templates to the page,this will not affect to other pages.


• Getting advantage of using DataView, FormView webparts etc.

That's all here.