Web Help Topic File Dates to Upload

[dempseypat]

When creating web help, the modified date on the file in the Publish folder seems to be based on the last time the topic was edited.

When I FTP the files from the publish folder to update the web site containing the help, do I only need to upload the files with today's modified date (assuming it was compiled today), or will that cause trouble?

Regards,
Pat

[Tim Green]

Hi Pat,

This can be OK, but only if you have not made any changes in your templates. If the topic timestamp is set to the last edit time (you can change this in HTML Export Options), then all the topics will be changed but their last edit timestamps will not be changed. This can be create all kinds of errors if you update your skin, for example, because you will then only get topic template updates in topics that have been edited since your last publish.

Technically it would be best to check the content of the files and update those that have changed. Unfortunately, doing this on a web server requires uploading or downloading all the files in order to be able to compare their checksums (unless you have a very intelligent FTP program that maintains a list of the last checksums, but I have never seen this feature yet) -- and that would take much, much longer and use much more bandwidth than just uploading everything.

[dempseypat]

Thank you. I had the feeling it might not be as simple as it looked.

I think I will just replace all of the files each time, overwriting all of them. There are about 2,000 files and it only takes about 5 minutes or so to upload them all. That's been working so far. LOL

-Pat-