I’ve just found a bit of a bug in the RedDot content management system (version 7.5, so it’s an old and cranky version) which some people might be looking for help with.
When submitting new pages to workflow, my client was getting an error saying “Keyword required from category ”” – an empty, non-existant keyword category. Although the page was right and had the keywords which should be assigned, it just wouldn’t submit. Trying to delete (or create and then delete) this keyword didn’t work; it just didn’t exist.
Where the problem came from
In building the site, I’d copied an existing project and then deleted unneeded elements – including unneeded keywords. However, some of these keywords were pre-assigned to a page template and, rather than deleting them, it merely deleted the content on those keywords.
Copying the content classes in order to re-create and hopefull kick out the empty keyword didn’t work; the rogue keyword was copied as well.
How to avoid the problem
Several options exist:
- Don’t delete keywords – however, this could be confusing for users if the project you copy has a lot of redundant ones – and you’ll end up with irrelevant keywords on some content.
- Delete pre-assigned keywords before deleting keywords and categories – do this on not only content classes but also on lists, just to be sure. My issue wasn’t related to lists as such, but you can’t be too careful.
- Create content classes from scratch rather than copying… the best solution in any project, but time-consuming and as such expensive.
How to fix the problem
This is the bit I wish there had been a blog post about (hence this one!) – how to fix it.
- Recreate the content class of the page you’re having trouble with – I copied all the template code and pasted into a new template, then went through all the elements on the page making sure they were correct (don’t forget that copying content class code resets everything to an anchor element!).
- Make sure that if you’ve preassigned a content class to a list element that you also assign the new version of that content class, or you’ll not be able to do the next step.
- Replace the content class of *one* example page you’re having issues with – perhaps create a test version using the old template first. This will make sure you’ve got everything right before you go breaking things…
- Double check all your references and container links are in place on the new version.
- Submit to workflow and then check the page. If it submits, you’ve fixed it and can move on to step 6.
- Go back to the content class and make sure all references to site-wide containers – navigation etc – are set up as per the old template.
- Replace the content class of all pages with that content class. Simply click another page you’re having an issue with, click “replace content class”.
- Now go back and remove the old content class from preassignment, if applicable.
This should fix the issue and stop it recurring.
Hope that helps someone – not sure if RedDot are aware of this, but it could well be old versions anyway.