One of the first things I have students do in an End User SharePoint Workshop is to create a test environment so they can play in a sandbox without blowing away their production environment. ("Who, me?" I know, I know. YOU would never implement untested changes in a production environment, but I guarantee you the person sitting in your chair ten seconds ago would.)
Let’s say you have setup a site to use as a testing environment and are ready to kill it because you’ve finished this phase of testing. The site contains several subsites, maybe a blog or two and a few workspaces. Have you ever tried to delete a site like that and gotten this message: "Error deleting Web site "/sites/TestEnvironment/YourSite". You can’t delete a site that has subsites."
You probably went through the process of trying to delete the test site from the Site Admin screen using these steps…
- Site Actions -> Site Settings
- Site Administration: Delete this site
- Delete This Site: Delete button
- Are you sure you want to permanently delete this Web site and all it contents?: OK
- Error deleting Web site "/sites/TestEnvironment/YourSite". You can’t delete a site that has subsites
Other than the poorly designed workflow that would let you get all the way to the end before displaying an error message, the message itself is incorrect. You can delete a site that has subsites. You just have to do it from a different interface.
Now try it this way…
- Site Actions -> Site Settings
- Site Administration: Content and Structure
- In the left column, move to the parent of the main site to be deleted
- In the right column, choose the site to be deleted (YourSite in our example)
- Menu: Actions -> Delete
- Deleting the selected sites will permanently delete all content and user information. All subsites in this site will also be permanently lost. Do you want to continue?: OK
Relatively painless, right? Now you have no excuses for not creating a test environment.