Sitecore is skipping items during publishing. How to troubleshoot and find out why?

2
votes

I have a series of items that I had in a test instance of Sitecore, and I needed to publish them down to a Sitecore dev instance to do some debugging with them. All the publishing down from test to the master DB in dev worked fine. I then went to publish those items out to the web database in dev. All the publishing of the ancillary items (templates, layouts, renderings, sublayouts, media library items, etc.) worked fine, but my actual content items are getting skipped (well, technically the root node of the section I'm publishing is skipped, so nothing under it gets published, either). I have no clue why it's getting skipped -- is there a way to get visibility to that?

Here's what I've tried so far:

  • Making a copy of the content item node and trying to publish that. SKIPPED.
  • Adding a new item in the content tree of the same template type as the content node and trying to publish that. SKIPPED.
  • Packaging, rather than publishing, the items from test, installing in dev and trying to publish. SKIPPED.
  • Deleting all the related items from the web database and republishing in a different order (everything in the Layout folder prior to any templates). All the ancillary items republish fine. The content items are SKIPPED.

I'm a little stuck, and there's nothing in the logs that's helpful (it just shows that the publish starts and ends, but nothing to indicate why anything's getting skipped).

Appreciate any help or ideas on how to figure out why these particular items are not publishing.

6
content-management-systemsitecorepublishing
Check if the template of your root node exists and is published on your target database. – Martijn van der Put
Thank you -- I'd checked that already, and yes, all the required templates were out there. – wildwend
@wildwend: What was the root cause of this? What was the solution? – NutsAndBolts

6 Answers

3
votes

Can you transfer the items from master to web db directly?

From Sitecore Control Panel -> Database -> Transfer items to another database.

It really sounds like a workflow/publishing restriction issue as idisposable11 says. Check there's no workflow attached, check the workbox to make sure nothing is in the queue, make sure the items have been submitted for review/approved if they are in workflow, and check there isn't date/time set for publishing restriction.

You can probably add in a handler to the publish:itemXXX event, or there maybe something in the publish pipeline you could add to help log/debug and step through, would need to take a look when I am front of a machine with Sitecore installed.

2
votes

Try this:

  1. Go to the item in Content Editor and on the Publish tab, click Change in the restrictions section.
  2. Click the Targets tab.
  3. On the targets tab, check which targets are allowed. Check the target you need to publish to.

I believe if you have nothing checked, Sitecore will publish to all available targets. Check here for more info.

2
votes

There is another scenario that can cause this. Hopefully this saves someone in the future.

If a higher level item is set to Never Publish (even if the change is ONLY saved to the master database), any child item (nested) will be automatically unpublished regardless of what is attempted.

You can track down the culprit if you right click to the left of the content tree and select Publishing Warnings. The Warnings flag does not cascade downward as you would presume, but DOES affect any nested child.

In our case, somehow the /sitecore item was set to this accidentally, which caused any publish on the site to remove items.

2
votes

Make sure that the Folder under which the item-to-be-published resides has a version. If it doesn't, the items will be skipped.

1
votes

Have you looked at any publishing restriction defined? It could also be that there's a workflow defined for the content items being published.

1
votes

There is a setting in the Sitecore.config which is the Publishing.PublishEmptyItems. By default it is set to false. For me, setting it to true fixed the problem.

<setting name="Publishing.PublishEmptyItems" value="true"/>