Where is the rest of my site?

Over two months ago ( you can tell how far behind I am in my blog posts) I built out a French variation of our clients site on our development server, just to get an idea of what the variation mechanism would rebuild. It took nearly 8 hours to build it (it is a very large site) and I selected the option to build both the sites and the pages.

When it was done creating the hierarchies, I started poking into the French site with SharePoint Designer. The first thing I noticed was that all of the pages were in draft mode, which makes sense. With the page in draft mode, you can send the text out to be translated and insert the translated text into the site and approve the page.

The next thing I noticed was that all of the custom lists and document libraries that I created in the English site were not created in the French site. I found this a little odd in that the columns would be the same in the lists and libraries. I did some poking around and found that the variations will only create the pages and any document libraries and lists that the system needs.

The last thing I noticed was that the documents that we placed in the documents document library in some of the subsites were not created. So I had to recreate those documents myself.

Other things to notice include if you add any custom code to the page layouts, some of the pages may not work in your new variation especially if the logic is looking for a specific column or custom list. Once you recreate the column or list, though the page will work fine and will still contain all of the data that the original page did.

In my next post I will be discussing a sample plan for the location of files in a multi-lingual SharePoint site.