SP 2010 Variations copy list

Question

I have create a new Site Collection with Publishing Infrastructure Top Level Site.

I create the variation root to be "/"

I added a variation label "fr", Ran "Create Hierarchy", then created a new List named "Events" (in fr variation)

Then I added a second label "en", Ran "Create Hierarchy", but the "Events" list is not there. Is that normal, isn't it suppose to copy everything in the site.

I may not understand the way Variations really work in SP. This is kinda new for me.

Thanks

Answer 1

I think that's expected behaviour. When you set-up Variation, only pages will be copied from source site to target sites. It does not includes lists etc.

If you are just beginning with Variations, I would recommend you read this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262404.aspx

So that you get a high level understanding of variation functionality.

Answer 2

The variation mechanism will solely copy publishing pages from the "Pages" library and no other list. There are solutions (eg on codeplex) to increase the scopes of this process but it's not the expected native behavior.

You could try to refactor your process to either :

• locate common information at the root of your site collection and have a language field that will be used as filter
• rely on a web definition for the root of your variation (onet & webtemp) to provision automatically upon creation of a label the required lists (my usual way of working).
• Manually create all relevant lists at the relevant locations based on an existing list template
• Create a web scoped feature that will provision your list template / instance and activate it (manually, through powershell, through stapling, etc.)

Regarding Variations, the best articles you can find are the serie written by Stefan Gossner http://blogs.technet.com/b/stefan_gossner/archive/2011/11/14/sharepoint-variations-the-complete-guide-part-1-the-basics.aspx. If you want to do anything serious about variation, you need to fully swallow all these articles.