Portal, change notification and reset button walk into a bar… We did discuss portal refresh previously and the topic seems to have been closed. But some users have reported that, despite all of the correct settings, portal cache refresh just was not working as advertised and the only solution to make the changes visible was to restart the portal.

Dileep Singh, the man on the inside, to the rescue.

If you’re observing an erratic portal cache refresh behaviour and entity change tracking does not seem to be doing its job, your organisation may not enabled for change notification monitoring [from the portal point of view]. This is an internal setting which gets enabled when you provision a portal (or enable relevance search). However, if you reset your org or restore it from another org, after provisioning the portal, it can get reset.

To enable it again, go to Portal Management Page > Portal details tab, modify the name of the portal and submit. This will enable the tracking and cache will start working.

Bonus

Developers, rejoice! There is a hidden new feature in the new release that you might like to know about.

If you log into the portal with site admin permissions, you can visit the about page (append _services/about to your portal url). This page will show additional diagnostic information if you are an admin as well as a reset cache button. W00t!

That said, you should not need to reset cache in normal operations. The admin button was added to help portal development scenarios where developers need instantaneous cache updates so that they can debug and develop without slowing down.