March 5, 2008
I was trying to delete a master page in SharePoint designer, and I got the error “This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages”. This was strange, as we knew that the master page had been reset for all sites in the site collection. We simply couldn’t find a reference.
Well, it turns out that this is a bug, and that Katrien De Graeve has an answer – create a folder, move the master page into the folder, delete the folder. Bizarre, but it works. And I have no idea how the heck they figured that out…
When i go to move the file it still says “This item cannot be deleted because it is still referenced by other pages”
Hmm. I don’t know then… I’d check that a) it really isn’t referenced by other pages, and b) it’s checked in. If both those are true, I’m afraid I don’t have any other ideas – though if you do get it sorted, let me know how!
Oh, and you can use the site content and structure pages to find out what files reference a page, though sometimes it will report slightly spurious results – such as master pages, or CSS files.
Brilliant – just what needed
Thanks for posting this. I was having a hard time figuring this one out, but your solution worked!
Excellent – thanks ever so much for posting!
Thanks, I moved all the unwanted MasterPages to a folder and then successfully deleted it.
Nice one! It works great
Haha, it worked!
Nice =)