Page Template Updating, works on one of my websites, not on another... huh?

Developing with Concrete
1

I have two websites that have been operational for multiple years. And one of them I’m finally getting my ass in gear to make some page templates for it. The problem is that once I make a page with said template, that page does not update when the template is changed. However, another site I have been running for a while, the pages made by a template DO update when the template is updated! I cannot see what I’m doing wrong (plus the documentation is horribly lacking in this area).

For the “working” site I’m running:
# concrete5 Version
Core Version - 8.5.6
Version Installed - 8.5.6
Database Version - 20210622145600

For the “not-working” (template updates) site I’m running:
# concrete5 Version
Core Version - 8.5.12
Version Installed - 8.5.12
Database Version - 20220319043123

>> BOTH websites use the same site-wide theme (from the marketplace)

On the working site, I have an Articles template that I made with a new Page Type, and then customised the Blank template. On an example Article that’s already published, I make some extremely obvious changes to the template, and after saving, clearing cache, the existing Article page reflects the changes to the template I made (changing sizing for a layout, adding a block, whatever).

On the NOT working site, applying a Page Type and custom Template to an existing page has no effect (unsure if this is working as intended) AND, most importantly, when I make a page with the new Page Type + Template combo (customising the Blank Template) the page reflects the state of the template at time of creation. However when I go modify that template on that site, the page I just published does not change at all so far as I can tell. That is even after multiple cache clears, etc. I don’t even see any errors in the logs. This can be anything like, adding a block, removing a block, changing contents in a content block, changing sizing for a layout… NOTHING changed to the template reflects in the existing page.

What’s going on here??!?!?!?! :frowning:

2

I’m on SiteGround and they have pretty aggressive caching schemes so when something like this happens I always have to visit their cPanel → Speed → Cache and clear the server’s cache. Could this be true of your host as well?

3

This actually looks to be a limitation of the features of Page Templates, not of caching. In that the aspects I was changing is not propagated by Page Templates. I have direct and total access to the infrastructure (self-hosted) and did fiddle with caching a lot in my testing, with no change in results.

4

Yeah I’m with @mhawke on this one - the only explanation if caching of some sort. Might be OPcache, might be full page caching in Concrete CMS, might be a varnish or CDN setup you have on one or not the other. But that’s all that really makes sense.