How do Content Type changes impact existing articles?

Environment:

• Oracle B2C Service
• Sites with Knowledge Advanced only, all versions
• Authoring
• Changing Content Type Properties on Authoring Repository Tab

Issue:

When making changes to content type properties it is important to consider the impact of those changes.

Resolution:

In general changes that do not impact user access or the authoring content find do not impact older articles.

For example:

If the product selection is changed to required, older articles without a product selection are not impacted, they are still valid articles. The only impact will be when the article is edited again the user will not be able to save the article without selecting a product. Other authoring operations outside of edit, including publish, can be performed if an older article does not have a product selection.

When the front end user selects a product while viewing search results, the older articles would not be visible under that product unless it was selected when authoring the article. See article Product and Category Filtering/Faceting Behavior for Search.

Be sure to test property changes in a test environment.