This one happened today:

After publishing a page and waiting a few minutes, the page does not get propagated to the other variations, so you go to the variation propagation page and see something like this:

The job seems to start, but it does nothing, and the updated variation logs are empty,and it never ends…

The logs (as usual) don’t say anything is going wrong, and if you create a new page it seems to work fine, but not with the previously created pages…

Our very problem was that we changed the default AAM two days ago, so the main url for our webapp has changed, so since the PublisingPages have the full url of their layouts in the “PublishingPageLayout” property, the system was unable to locate the layout and the propagation failed.

You can see the layout url by using Sharepoint Manager 2007 and looking for the “PublishingPageLayout” property of the page, if it is not the new url of your site collection you might be in trouble.

Another problem that might arise is that you’re unable to see and edit the page properties of the page, and then you get a file not found error in the logs:

The Solution?

Use the following code: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/FixPageLayout It will check all the pages and correct the wrong pagelayout url.

A TIP: Modify the code to make a SystemUpdate so it will work much, much faster. :)

By the way here is another problem that can arise when changing Alternate Access Mappings: http://blogs.renacimiento.com/eblanco/archive/2008/12/16/broken-search-after-changing-alternate-access-mappings.aspx