This is one of the great tips we have in SharePoint. There are many scenarios why we need this. I had very tough time to migrate a SharePoint 2007 site to SharePoint 2010 site. What happened was,
- The other team deployed a custom web part 2 years ago.
- Used that web part on different pages in that site.
- They have taken the site template from the option "save site as template".
- After an year, they have removed that web part from the site collection.
- But, with the same site template they have taken in the step #3, they created few sites in the same site collection after they removed the web part from environment.
- Remember, the site template still has the references to that custom web part. So, when I try to migrate it always fails..
Sometimes it is very difficult to find what is causing the problem. The sites created were not published sites. So, I cannot go to Edit Properties of the page and go to web part maintenance page from there. As the default.aspx page is directly in the root of the site/web I do not have any other choice to go to web part maintenance page. After a long research I found from Google that the querystring ?contents=1 will do job for me.
Resolution:
In SharePoint, for any web part ASPX page if you append the querystring ?contents=1 then it automatically redirects to the web part maintenance page.
Example:
For the SharePoint site page
http://mossurl/default.aspx the web part maintenance page url is
http://mossurl/default.aspx?contents=1
