Behavior Notes

• The earlier destination spellings still load. ePublisher 2026.1 renamed these surfaces: a composition job declares its shared destination with <Destination name="…"/> where pre-release builds used <DeployTarget>, and a job file target names its destination with destination="…" where it used deployTarget="…". The earlier spellings are still accepted when a file is opened, for one release, and the current spelling is written whenever the file is saved.

• Unbuilt members are checked against the composition's destination. For each member the composition does not build, it compares the destination that member's job declares for the selected output target against its own. A different name — or no destination at all — is reported as a warning, because the composition would be assembling output that member never delivers to the destination it reads. The comparison is by name, so two names that happen to resolve to the same location are still reported. Members the composition builds are not checked: they are deployed to the composition's destination by definition.

• A shell target that cannot compose stops the run. Target selection is validated before any member builds, so a target that is not compose-capable is normally caught there. The composition itself checks the shell one more time, because it is the shell's format that supplies the compose conventions, and reports an error naming the format it was handed: The shell member's selected target uses format '<name>', which does not support federated composition; the composition needs a Reverb 2.0 (compose-capable) shell target. Select a WebWorks Reverb 2.0 target for the shell member and run the composition again.

• A parcel published by a different format or release is warned and left out. Every parcel records the format and the release that built it. Before placement, the composition compares each parcel found at the destination against the shell's and skips the ones that disagree, because a parcel built by another format — or by another release of the same format — cannot share the composed site's runtime. The warning names the parcel and both versions and tells you to rebuild and redeploy it. The rest of the site composes normally; a skew that removes every parcel leaves the composition with nothing to assemble, and it says so rather than producing an empty site. Output published before parcels recorded their format is not compared, so an older parcel is not skipped on this account alone.

• Deployments never delete outside their own slice. If a destination previously received a full (non-federated) deployment, stale files from that run are not removed by scoped deployments — clean the destination deliberately before repurposing it as a federation's shared destination.

• Clean is an AutoMap capability. The Deploy command in ePublisher and Express copies files but does not clean; use AutoMap's clean-deploy option when a slice must be reset.

• Search within a missing parcel is silently absent. When a declared parcel is not deployed, the composed site loads and searches normally, but results that would have come from the missing parcel are simply not present — there is no runtime error to signal it.