How To Fix Publishing Pages Page Layout URL

The scenario when moving you want to move a publishing site collection that is your root site collection to a new location

ie http://rootsc —> http://sites/rootsc

You expect a simple backup & restore to the new location to do the job. However once your restore is complete you try to load your site collection in its new location & you get:

The resource cannot be found.

Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

You click ‘View Source’ in IE & you get:

The file /_catalogs/masterpage/blahblah.aspx does not exist.
at Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModuleData.GetWebPartPageData(HttpContext context, String path, Boolean throwIfFileNotFound)

The problem is that your publishing pages are still looking at the old location for the master page files etc using the old URL. Fortunately Gary Lapointe MVP has written a script to parse through the whole site collection & update the paths accordingly.

The utility runs as an STSADM command & is called gl-fixpublishingpagespagelayouturl

Read more about it & download it here

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If you have enabled anonymous access on your Sharepoint farm and you still get prompted for a login when trying to access a list, it is most likely that your list exists in a ‘Publishing Site’.

This is because by default all publishing sites have a feature called ‘ViewFormPagesLockdown’ activated. This basically provides extra security for internet facing Sharepoint sites by stopping anonymous users viewing pages like AllItems.aspx etc.

If you want anonymous users to be able to view such pages you need to disable ‘ViewFormPagesLockdown’

1 Remove all anonymous access from the site.
2 Deactivate the ViewFormPagesLockdown Feature
3 Make sure that the list inherits its permissions from its parent.
4 Do an IISreset and close all browsers.
5 Wait 60 seconds or so for everything to start backup
6 Turn anonymous access on at the site level
7 Close the browser.
8 Browse to the website as anonymous user.
9 Click on a navigation link to browse to the list in question
10 You should now be able to browse list items as an anonymous user.

Activate Feature:

stsadm -o activatefeature -url -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml

De-Activate Feature:

stsadm -o deactivatefeature -url -filename ViewFormPagesLockDown\feature.xml

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If you are getting this error its because you are trying to edit a publishing page. To edit a publishing page you will need to first detach it from its ‘Master Page Layout’, now you can edit it as you wish but any changes to the master layout obviously will no longer apply to this page.

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