Unpublish parent page without unpublishing child pages

[Berus]

AEM has the feature which allows content authors to include/exclude child pages during publish or unpublish. This feature looks to be broken, tested on v6.5.6 (current) and v6.5.9 (latest) versions. Can someone confirm if this is a product bug or if I’m doing something wrong? And also suggest if there are any alternative OOTB options available. Also tried using Request for Deactivation workflow, it unpublishes both the parent and child pages. 

[Shubham_borole]

Hello @Berus 

I tried this in AEM 6.5.8 and able to publish multi level pages. Created pages at content/we-retail/us/products/man/coat/p1,  content/we-retail/us/products/man/coat/p1/p2,  content/we-retail/us/products/man/coat/p1/p3,  content/we-retail/us/products/man/coat/p1/p2/p4,  content/we-retail/us/products/man/coat/p1/p3/p5 and so on.

I published p1 and used Manage Publication and unchecked 'Filter by Depth' and 'Filter by status' I was able to see all child pages replicated successfully to the publisher.

Are you seeing any errors in error logs and/or replication logs? In what terms is this broken for you?

[Kishore_Kumar_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Berus ,

Its not possible to deactivate parent page alone excluding child pages. If you de-activate parent page, child pages also automatically will get deactivated.

I hope you would have got some warnings when you tried to deactivate parent page in author.

[chandrareddy]

Your answer is correct, but One question,

We can activate child pages, without activating the parent page. This is also technically wrong.

How can we avoid this? Is there any way to alert user don not activate child pages until parent page is activated.

[daspicko]

Hi @chandrareddy ,

It is an old topic, but I can see the same behavior occurs today. Did you get answer to question why the parent page is not published when editor publish child page?

[Asutosh_Jena_]

Hi @Berus 

You cannot deactivate only a parent page and keep the child pages. All the pages are arranged in the pattern and they form the URL structure, i.e., if you have

/content/we-retail/abc.html

/content/we-retail/abc/123.html

/content/we-retail/abc/234.html

Now if you want to unpublish abc then what will happen to the URL for the remaining items?

/content/we-retail/123.html?

/content/we-retail/234.html?

Unpublishing a content from AEM will remove all it's reference and it's child reference. So it's not possible to unpublish only Parent and retain the child pages.

Also you will get the warning something like below when you try to do so.

Thanks!

[Dipti_Chauhan]

Hi @Berus 

   you can not only deactivate parent page without deactivating child pages . If you deactivate parent node , it is writing an empty node in its place. So effectively it deactivates or deletes the sub pages .

Thanks

Dipti

[Berus]

Thanks all for your response. I do not see any error/warning in the logs because AEM is forcing me to click on unpublish with a message that the child pages also get unpublished. I had previously assumed the same that a user cannot unpublish a parent page without unpublishing the child pages also. I believe this document should be updated by removing unpublish option or adding a note. 

The use case I am trying to solve for my content team is Blogs. They have urls which look like /blog/year/month/page.html. Content team does not want /year and /month folders to return a 200, rather 404 as there's no content on the page. So, /year/month are only for organizing and structure purposes and also because AEM has a node limitation of 5k related to performance etc. Since the /year and /month are already published they plan to only unpublish those individual page(s) and not affect the actual blog pages. This does look like a valid use case.

The options that I see are, 

1. Unpublish from crx/de - manually, has dev intervention 

2. Unpublish year and month pages and use tree activation to activate individual blog pages 

3. Develop a custom process step and workflow which only unpublishes individual parent page and not child pages.  

If anyone has comments or suggestion on the approach, let me know. Thanks in advance.