Hi all,

Recently, we came across a severe problem in production farm with the Content Types. I would like to explain the background of this problem first.

We have nice working feature for Content Types installation in production and test farms. We developed and deployed (using wsps) this SharePoint feature in Visual studio. We are using the publishing pages using page layouts and Content Types to help content editors to quickly publish the web pages. Unfortunately, some Content Types have been manually updated/added by some people in the production, so whenever I (developer) make some changes to the existing Content Types (using Visual Studio and feature activation/deactivation) , SharePoint removes one or two columns (during feature activation/deactivation) from Content Types; or the columns which have not been added in a best practice way. I think the best practice is to update Content Types using Visual Studio.

Now, I wish to ensure that site columns shouldn't get removed from Content Types upon feature activation/deactivation.

Note: Our feature for Content Type activation/deactivation doesn't hold any activation dependencies in the feature.xml