We have a publishing site with variations. We usually want to have control over when a variation is created, so we have disabled the Automatic Creation option.

It works well to manually submit variations on sites that are already created with the automatic creation option on. However, if we create a subsite on the source variation structure when auto creation is off, all variations are disabled on that site. It's not possible to submit the site or subpages on that sites as variations manually. The icon on Manage Content and Structure indicates a normal site, not a variation site, even though it's located under a variation branch.

How do we do this? Surely it must be possible to submit a variation for a site, not just a page that is located under a site that already has its correspondig variation created automatically?