Can Pages By Status be used to approve "Live" status pages?

CM1
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It appears this isn’t possible, but we very much need it to be. Our issue is kind of hard to explain, so bare with me, I’ll do my best.

How can we approve pages that are in “live” status, to put them into “pending” status, so they will be triggered for an Incremental Publish?

Hitting Approve on a “Live” page while you’re in the Editor will bring it back to “pending,” however this is not a good solution for us. We’re hoping there’s a way to approve all of the pages within a workflow so we can publish only that one section of our site.

For example - here is one of many different scenarios we’ll need this:
If we change a section name within the Navigation menu, we then need to re-publish out each individual page within that section for change to appear on the live site. To do this, we were told to use the Pages by Status gadget to filter the section by Workflow, and then Approve all of the pages. However, that gadget will not approve pages that are in “Live” status. You can Approve them in the Editor though; I assume it’s because you bring it to “Quick Edit” status first when you click to edit it.

This means to trigger a section for publishing, we have to open up each individual page within the section/workflow and approve it. Many of our sections range between 100-200+ pages, meaning thats how many pages we would have to individually open and approve.

At one time we were told we could also accomplish this by making a change to the template. This would trigger all the pages that use that template for publishing. However, all of our pages, across all of our sections and workflows, use the same template. So this action triggered almost every single page on our entire website for publishing. This caused pages to be publishing which people were saving in a hidden state in Draft, Review, Content, and Quick Edit statuses. Is also took several hours to complete the publish.

If I had to try to word this question differently, for perhaps clarity, I would say:
Is there a way to bulk/mass Approve pages which are in any status, including “Live?” Because currently, the Pages by Status Gadget does not Approve “Live” pages.

Thank you in advance for any help and insight you can provide to us!

Thank you!
Gregg

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Hi Gregg,

To my knowledge there is no way to do this. The only thing I can offer up as a suggestions to to make a unique template for areas that are needing to be published together and do it that way.

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I thought of that as well, however the only trouble is we have 187 sections with unique workflows and 12,000 pages that would need their template changed. That would be a great solution though if our site wasn’t so big!

Along the same lines, It would also be greatly beneficial if there was a way to bulk un-publish (“Remove from site”) pages and assets. Or bulk change them to any status… in addition to the Pages by Status allowing you to put them into “Pending” status.

Thank you for your input, Matt! I really appreciate you taking the time to contribute.

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Gregg,

Why is a full publish not the right answer to this problem? The intent of Incremental Publish is to push out pages that have had their content changed. Changing navigation is a design change, which is why it is not picked up by incremental publish.  I realize you have a large site and that full publish will take awhile, but a full publish is the only way that navigation and relationships will properly update across the site. 

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Hi Dan,

A Full Publish is not the ideal answer to this question, however I understand that currently it is the solution. Also, as I said, publishing the navigation is just one of many scenario’s we would benefit from having this functionality. Another one of the major situations is an update to a shared asset - and more. I’ll further describe our Full Publish issue throughout this comment.

Ultimately, I was just curious if there’s a way to bulk approve “Live” pages from possibly the Pages by Status gadget - and if not, to express our interest in that functionality and see if anyone else was interested in it too.

Using navigation as one example again:
An Incremental publish does currently work to update the navigation, as long as the pages are in “Pending” status. Currently the Pages by Status gadget will change any status to Pending “except” for Live pages. So my question was, could the functionality of the gadget also Approve “Live” pages? As of now, we have to open up every single page in the section, approve it, and then run the incremental publish.

Here’s some more information regarding why a Full Publish is not the answer:
A full publish of our site takes 5 hours. It slows down our site so badly that we can’t run it during business hours, therefore, we run them at 5pm. If there’s an emergency and someone needs a change made at 9am, we can’t run the full publish until 5pm, and then their emergency update wouldn’t be live until 10pm. We have 187 sections with unique and independent navigations. The number of pages per section can reach 200+. We have 300+ active users that could potentially be making updates to the navigation, shared assets, and etc. on a daily basis. Emergencies and updates to shared assets etc. are very common.

Therefore, if there was anyway that we could bulk/mass approve pages that are in “Live” status, so they would be triggered for an Incremental Publish, that would be extremely helpful. It sounds clear though that this functionality does not exist.

I appreciate your input, however a full publish is not an efficient solution for us.

Thanks,
Gregg

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