Manage automatic propagation of variation pages

Applies to: SharePoint Server 2010

The variations feature makes content available to specific audiences on different sites by copying content from a source variation site to each target variation site. The Automatic Creation setting determines whether sites and pages on the source variation site are created automatically on the target variation sites. By default, this setting is enabled. However, there might be cases in which you do not want pages to propagate automatically. For example, if you have multilingual sites, you might not want changes from the source page to propagate automatically to your translated pages. You can use Windows PowerShell and the object model to disable automatic propagation of variation pages. When automatic propagation is disabled, the Automatic Creation setting is ignored for pages, although sites continue to follow the Automatic Creation setting. Instead, you can publish pages on-demand by clicking Create or Update from the Publish menu to propagate source versions to all targets.

For more information about propagating variation pages, see Variations: Propagate Pages on Your Terms. For more information about variations, see Variations overview (SharePoint Server 2010).

In this article:

• Disable automatic propagation of variation pages

• Enable automatic propagation of variation pages

Disable automatic propagation of variation pages

You can disable automatic propagation by using Windows PowerShell and the object model. When automatic propagation is disabled, you can propagate source pages to all targets on-demand by clicking Create or Update from the Publish menu.

To disable automatic propagation of variation pages

1. Verify that you meet the following minimum requirements:

   • See Add-SPShellAdmin.

   • You must read about_Execution_Policies (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=193050).

2. Copy the following code and paste it into a text editor, such as Notepad:

   $site = Get-SPSite "<VariationURL>"
   $folder = $site.RootWeb.Lists["Relationships List"].RootFolder
   $folder.Properties.Add("DisableAutomaticPropagation", $true)
   $folder.Update()
   $site.Close()
   

3. Replace <VariationURL> with the URL of the variation site collection.

4. Save the file, naming it Disable-Propagation.ps1.

   Note

   You can use a different file name, but you must save the file as an ANSI-encoded text file whose extension is .ps1.

5. On the Start menu, click All Programs.

6. Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

7. Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

8. Change to the directory where you saved the file.

9. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command:

   ./Disable-Propagation.ps1
   

Enable automatic propagation of variation pages

You can enable automatic propagation by using Windows PowerShell and the object model.

To enable automatic propagation of variation pages

1. Verify that you meet the following minimum requirements:

   • See Add-SPShellAdmin.

   • You must read about_Execution_Policies (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=193050).

2. Copy the following code and paste it into a text editor, such as Notepad:

   $site = Get-SPSite "<VariationURL>"
   $folder = $site.RootWeb.Lists["Relationships List"].RootFolder
   $folder.Properties.Remove("DisableAutomaticPropagation")
   $folder.Update()
   $site.Close()
   

3. Replace <VariationURL> with the URL of the variation site collection.

4. Save the file, naming it Enable-Propagation.ps1.

   Note

   You can use a different file name, but you must save the file as an ANSI-encoded text file whose extension is .ps1.

5. On the Start menu, click All Programs.

6. Click Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.

7. Click SharePoint 2010 Management Shell.

8. Change to the directory where you saved the file.

9. At the Windows PowerShell command prompt, type the following command:

   ./Enable-Propagation.ps1 
   

See Also

Other Resources

Running Windows PowerShell Scripts