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 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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You need to edit a page in Sharepoint but the ‘Edit’ option is greyed out for example on a survey page.

Simply append NewForm.aspx with ?ToolPaneView=2 so it looks like

/NewForm.aspx?ToolPaneView=2

You now have your page in edit mode so you can add webparts etc

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