Disabling and Deleting Pages

If you have a page that you no longer want displayed on your website you have two choices – you can disable the page or delete it.

Disable or Delete – what’s the difference?

Disabling a page is simply turning it off. If a page is disabled it will not show up on your website in your menu. But you can still have a link to this page. If you want the page to reappear on your website, you can enable it again at any time. A disabled page will still appear in your main list of pages in Manage Your Pages, but it will be greyed out and have a red cross next to it.

Deleting a page actually deletes the page and moves it into your Trash folder. A deleted page will not show up on your website and you can not link to it from another page. Any existing links will not work. Once a page has been deleted and moved to your Trash folder you can restore it if you realise you have deleted it by accident, unless you have emptied your Trash folder. If you empty your Trash folder, any pages that were in the Trash folder are permanently deleted.

Disabling a Page

Disabling a page is useful if:

• You think you might want to use the page again at a later date. For instance, the page is contains information about a periodic event, such as a once a year fundraiser. You might only want the event to be advertised on your website for a few weeks but know that next year you will want to reuse the page to readvertise the event. Rather than having to recreate the page next year you can just disable it and enable it again at a later date.
• You are halfway through creating a new page and need to save it to work on later, but don’t want anyone to be able to view your page yet.
• You are revising a page and don’t want anyone to be able to see your changes until you are finished. This is particularly useful if you need your manager for instance to approve the changes that you are making before they go live on the website. Your manager can log into cmsadvantage and view the page, but no one else can see the page while it is still disabled
• The page contains information that you don’t want people to be able to access directly from your main menu. For instance you might have a ‘Terms and Conditions’ page or a questionnaire that you only want people to be access from a specific point in your site using a link. This is useful on large websites that have a lot of pages – if the menu starts getting too large and confusing it may be an idea to disable some of the pages and just provide links to them.

How to disable a page

To disable a page go to Site Management > Manage Your Pages.

Locate the page that you want to disable. To disable the page simply click on the green enabled icon next to the Page ID and Page Title. The icon should change to the red disabled icon.

Disabled pages still show up in the list of pages on your website when you view them in Manage Your Pages. However the page should appear on a grey background with the Disabled icon next to it.  If you check your website you will no longer be able to access this page via the menu. However any links that you have to this page from within your website will still work.

In the image below you can see that the Testimonials page has been disabled.

If you were to go to the website for this sample site you would not see Testimonials in the menu.

If it was enabled, then you would see both Testimonials and it's subpage Testimonials Form in the website navigation.

Disabling a page when it has SubPages

In the above example, the Testimonials page has been disabled. But you’ll note that it has a subpage called Testimonials Form. The Testimonials Form page is enabled as it has a green tick next to it.

If you went to the website you would not see the Testimonials Form page either. This is because the Top Level page it belongs to, Testimonials, is disabled.

So if you disable a Top Level page, any subpages linked to it will also act as if they are disabled. They will not appear on your website, however links to them will still work.

If you disable a subpage, the top level page and any other subpages will not be affected.

How to disable a page while you are Editing

If you are editing a page or creating a new page and would like it to be disabled while you work on it, you can set a page to disabled from within the Edit screen. Under Page Configuration is a field called Status of Page. Change the value of the drop down field to Disabled.

Click Submit to save your changes.

How to enable a disabled page

To enable the page again, go to Site Management > Mange Your Pages and locate your page. Click on the red disabled  icon next to that page and it should change to the green enabled  icon.

Alternatively, you can re-enable a page while you are editing it. Scroll down to the bottom of the Edit Page facility. Under Page Configuration is a field called Status of Page. Change the value of the drop down field to Enabled.

Click Submit to save your changes. The page should now have a  icon next to it in the Manage Your Webpages facility.

Deleting a Page

Important!

You should delete a page only if you want to permanently remove it from your website. While it will still be stored in your Trash folder (until you empty the Trash folder), it is better to disable a page if you think you might want to use it again in the future. If you are sure you won’t need the page again, delete it.

How to delete a page

To delete a page, go to Site Management > Manage Your Pages. Locate the page that you want to delete and click on the Delete  icon for that page. The icon is located on the far right of the screen.

Note:

Clicking on the delete icon will not permanently delete the page.

It will simply move the page to your Trash folder. Visitors to your website will no longer be able to access this page through your menu or any links that you may have to the page.

After clicking on the Delete icon, a pop up window will appear prompting you to click OK or Cancel. Click OK to delete. The Manage Your Webpages screen will refresh and an ‘Operation Successful’ message will be displayed at the top of the screen when the page has been successfully moved to the Trash folder. The page will no longer appear in the list of pages on your website or on your website itself.

To permanently delete the page, you then need to click on the Show Pages in Trash button on the Manage Your Webpages screen.

This will show you all of the pages that you have in your Trash folder. In the example below you can see the Testimonials Form page in the Trash folder.

You can choose to either empty the entire Trash folder by clicking Empty Trash Permanently or delete individual pages from Trash folder.

To delete a single page, click on the delete  icon to permanently delete the page.

Once you have finished deleting your page(s), click on the Show Live Pages button to return to the main Manage Your Webpages view.

How to restore a deleted page

If you have deleted a page by moving it to the Trash folder, you can restore the page provided you have not emptied the Trash Folder. Once restored, it again appears on your website.

If you have already permanently deleted the page from your Trash folder the page no longer exists. You cannot restore it!

To restore a page from your Trash folder, go to Site Management > Manage Your Pages. Click on the Show Pages in Trash button. This will show you all of the pages that you have in your Trash folder. Click on the Restore  icon for that page.

The Manage Your Webpages screen will refresh and display the live pages on your website with an ‘Operation Successful’ message displayed at the top of the screen. The page will once again appear in the list of pages on your website. It will also appear in the menu and any links to that page will work.