In this blog, I will describe about a Sitecore bug in version 10.1.1 where developers face issues if they try to use out-of-box placeholder items and especially when they try to move them from their default location.
Problem
We are working on upgrading from Sitecore 8.2 to Sitecore 10.1.1. We are making use of content placeholder present in Sitecore placeholder settings out of the box.
We are updating our solution to follow Helix conventions and decided to move the content placeholder to Project folder. But we encountered a weird issue in moving the 'content' placeholder to any Helix layer. To our surprise, it wont move after numerous attempts. We tried dragging the content placeholder item but that didnt work. Then we tried copying it using right click but that too didnt work. We tried updating its location in ymls related to it and then pushed the item but no success was achieved.
Solution
We created a Sitecore support ticket to understand this behavior Sitecore support team confirmed that this is a reproducible bug and they are implementing a fix for it. They registered this bug with reference number 522845.
Sitecore support suggested to avoid using the default 'content' placeholder item and try to create and use custom placeholder items under the '/sitecore/layout/Placeholder Settings/Project/<sitename>/' folder.
We also found a workaround where moving content placeholder setting to any of its parent items and then moving it to Project folder worked (it doesn't work each time, you may want to attempt multiple times).
We observed the same issue in moving the OOB sitecore/content/Home item as well. If you are starting to build or migrate your sites in Sitecore 10, please do take care of these issues.
Thanks for reading it. I hope it helped!