Variations in SharePoint allow site administrators to create multiple versions of the same site in various languages. This provides a simple yet powerful tool for creating multilingual websites. In a site collection with variations, a source variation site (or label) is configured as the primary location for content to be authored. For each variation (or language), a target site (or label) is created that receives its content from the source site.
In this recipe, we will cover the basic settings for site collection variations that we will use when we create our source and target labels in the Creating the primary language variation label and Creating the secondary language variation labels recipes.
Follow these steps to configure the site collection variation settings:
- Navigate to the site collection that will contain the source and target variations in your preferred web browser.
- Click on Site settings from the Settings menu.
- Select Variations Settings from the Site Collection Administration section as shown in the following screenshot:
- Under Site, List, and Page Creation Behavior, select Create Everywhere. Alternatively, Create Selectively may be selected in case you want to choose if a new piece of content should be published manually rather than automatically publishing all new content to the target sites:
- Under Recreate Deleted Target Page, select Recreate a new target page when the source page is republished. If a page is deleted in one of the target sites, this option will recreate the page if the source site publishes it again.
- Under Update Target Page Web Parts, select Update Web Part changes to target pages when variation source page update is propagated. If the web parts on a target page have been personalized, this will revert them to the state of the web parts in the source page.
- Click on OK.
The site collection variation settings control how the variations of the site collection should behave when content is created or updated. These settings allow us to choose whether or not content should automatically be published to target sites, whether or not pages in target sites that have been deleted should be recreated if the page is published again, and whether or not web parts customized in the target sites should be overwritten when a page is published again.
Determining which options to select depends upon the implementation. If very little is customized directly on the target sites, the default options to automatically publish new content, recreate deleted pages, and overwrite web part customizations are ideal. However, if customizations are made to pages in the target sites, configuring the options to not publish content automatically, not recreate deleted pages, and not overwrite web part customizations may be appropriate.
- The Variations overview in SharePoint 2013 article on TechNet at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628966.aspx
- The Create a multi-language website article on the Microsoft Office help website at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-server-help/create-a-multi-language-website-HA102886546.aspx