Small change in CMS 7 archiving functionality

At least since EPiServer 4 the page archiving functionality have been the same. You setup the archiving scheduled job and after that it’s up to the editors to set a date for when the page should stop being published and where the page should be archived to.

A nice feature in CMS 4 – 6 was that if you specified the archive page link on a top node i.e. a news container page, all news pages created below that container node would automatically get the containers archiving page set.

Last week I was setting up the example above in CMS7 but realized that the automatic inheritance of the archive page doesn’t exist in CMS 7.1.

In order for the editors to set the stop publish date and archive page they need to go to the forms view, choose tools and select the appropriate menu option just to get to the dialog! I really can’t make any sense of that design decision. It was much easier in the previous versions if you ask me.

Ok so how do we simplify this for the editors. In CMS7 we have the possibility to override a method (SetupDefaultValues) for setting up default values for a page type.

So it’s real easy to set up both the “StopPublish” date and the “ArchiveLink” link.