Variations: delete propagated drafts from target variations?

Question

I'm setting up variations for a new SharePoint 2010 website (i.e. public facing), and one remaining issue is how to handle unwanted updates to pages in the target variations.

On my test site I have a source variation that's in English US, and two target variations exist for French and Dutch. If a change is made to a English US page, variations will propagate that change to the French and Dutch variations, as expected.

• If that change is required for the French site, the draft can be updated and published.
• If that change is NOT required for the Dutch site, I want to delete that draft and keep the currently published Dutch page in place.

It's the latter scenario that I'm having trouble with. Right now I can see a way to restore the Dutch published page, but as our site uses "Publishing Site with Workflow" template, this would require that someone approves the restoration of that page. Surely there is a way to restore the currently published page, delete the propagated draft and not require any approval workflow?

I look forward to ideas or solutions :)

Kevin

Answer 1

As a suggestion, I think that in this case you probably want to disable automatic propagation, and explicitly propagate the pages you want to be translated, rather than have everything propagated and then try to undo some of them.

You have to do this with PowerShell - there is no option in the UI.

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

You will then need to publish pages on-demand by using Create or Update from the Publish menu to propagate source versions. I must admit here that I have not tried this - I am not sure if there is a way of specifying which target variations get the updates. You will at least have a bit more control.