Content Server News Portlet major design flaw ?!

Question

I ran into a Content Server 6.1 issue which is really frustrating me. I am wondering if I am doing something wrong or if it is a design flaw: 1. I created a content server news portlet "out of the box" and added it to my MyPage.2. I created and published 2 news articles.3. I edited the 1st article and just saved it. I did NOT PUBLISH it.4. I edited the 2nd article and PUBLISHED it. The news index is re-published automatically to reflect the changes of the 2nd article which has been published. But the index now displays the changes of BOTH articles, even the unpublished! Furthermore the 1st article can't be opened from the index anymore if the name property has been changed. As the published file name changes with each version and especially when the name is updated, the news index links to the new published file name - but it has never been created as I didn't publish the 1st article! I understand why this is happening: The index content item holds a list of all article content items and is published whenever an article is published / deleted / expired. But until now I thought that content server is holding the last published version and includes this into the list until a new version is published. That's not the case! Imagine this on a production environment with workflow activated: one article was approved and published while the other still needs to be reviewed, but it's (unreviewed) index data like headline etc. is already displayed in the index?! And in worst case the article can't even be opened. You just get the server error "page not found". Many of my content items for a current big project follow the idea of the news template, e.g. HR Staff Overview (persons = articles, overview = index), so I am kind of stressed by what I found out. Has anybody made similar a experience and found a workaround for this? Perhaps one of the support people could explain how the news portlet is intended to be used with this severe behaviour? Am I expecting too much? Is updating an already published article not possible? But why are version mechanisms included for content items then? I appreciate your comments. Thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks for the quick reply.
We are using Content Server 6.1 with all Hotfixes installed and we are not planning to upgrade to G6 at the moment.
As far as I understood the 'filtered.published' property contains the date the content item was published the last time. So it will always be 'true' if the item has been published in the past, no matter if it's currently published or not.
The index template with the code snippet you sent will display the currently not published (but changed) item properties whenever another item was published. Have you changed the design in 6.2 so that properties of an item in a list property of another item are just copied and not linked?
As a workaround I now compare the 'modified' property with the 'published' property and if it is greater or equal I don't display it in the index. But that's not the way Content Server was designed to behave, is it? With this solution I can suppress the item in the list if it has been modified after the last publishing, but of course I rather want to have the data of the last published version.
Isn't that possible? Is it possible in 6.2? Is there any way to update Content Server to 6.2 without acquiring G6?
RegardsStefan