CMS function to remove pages Options

[Christian J]

I'm planning a simple file manager in a CMS targetted towards novice site owners. Following Jakob Nielsen's Fighting Linkrot I hesitate to let site owners remove pages permanently, but maybe site owners should be allowed to remove pages temporarily, for example during major updates, or if disastrous content has been published by mistake and there's no time to correct it right away?

Such a temporary removal function brings up a few issues:

* How should the site respond when visitors request a temporary removed page through bookmarks or links on other sites? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...e-downtime.html suggests a 503 (Service Unavailable) combined with a Retry-After header, or even a 320 redirect to a 503.

* Should the site's nav menu keep a link to the temporarily removed page, or should the link remain but be disabled somehow, or should the link disappear altogether?

* How can I prevent site owners from abusing this to remove pages permanently? Maybe the site owner is discouraged from such mischief if I make the automatically generated nav menu keep showing the link (or just link text).

[Darin McGrew]

The wikis that I've worked with support outright deletion as well as replacing old URLs with redirections to new ones. I think there's a place for both of these approaches.

[Christian J]

I think there's a place for both of these approaches.

Do you disagree with Jakob?

I'm concerned that novice site owners will break incoming links, hurting their own site traffic as the result. So maybe a "delete file" feature will do more harm than good, at least if it's not designed properly (hence this thread).

[pandy]

Blasphemy!

[Darin McGrew]

Do you disagree with Jakob?

In general, no. If a resource is no longer there, then the server should usually send a 301 or 410 response, depending on whether the resource has moved (or been superseded), or is simply gone with no replacement. Sending 410 should be rare, but there are times when it's appropriate.

And there are some cases (generally, when the document shouldn't have been there in the first place, e.g., spam) where 404 is appropriate.

Anyway, I think it's probably a good idea to make 301 (Moved Permanently) redirects easy. Deleting something should be rare, whether it's a 404 or 410 response.

But I think there needs to be a way to handle "major updates" without deleting customer-facing documents. And in the case of "disastrous content" being published, I think the best approach is either to rollback the change or to delete the page that was published that shouldn't have been published.

[Christian J]

Anyway, I think it's probably a good idea to make 301 (Moved Permanently) redirects easy.

Shouldn't redirects be used when reorganizing a whole site, changing domain name or similar operations that you only perform very rarely? If so maybe it's best to let someone experienced do it with FTP instead of through a CMS. The purpose of my CMS is more to allow small frequent manual content updates, similar to an online HTML editor.

in the case of "disastrous content" being published, I think the best approach is either to rollback the change

A rollback might be useful, though it may not help if already the original version turns out to be disastrous.

or to delete the page that was published that shouldn't have been published

I have strong doubts about allowing novice users to create new pages too. Rather I'd see that an experienced webmaster created and deleted new pages for the site through FTP. Only thing I'd perhaps trust the novice site owner with would be temporary "emergency" removals, which brings me back to my first post...

[Christian J]

Off-topic post split to its own thread: http://forums.htmlhelp.com/index.php?showtopic=22654&hl=

/mod