Sitecore publish site in multi site tenancy

Question

We have two Sitecore 6.5 sites defined within one Sitecore instance so our structure is

/sitecore/content/Site1
/sitecore/content/Site2

If a user selects a site in the Sitecore backend, and then Publishes the site, will Sitecore then publish just the selected site or both the sites within the Sitecore instance?

Answer 1

Out of the box Sitecore will publish everything from both sites on a "site publish"- you can resolve this by:

1. Dead simple approach: just do an "item publish" on the desired site root and include subitems.

2. Configure a custom publish target as described by John West: http://www.sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/Posts/2011/05/All-About-Publishing-Targets-in-the-Sitecore-ASPNET-CMS.aspx

Answer 2

If you have 2 sets of users, i.e. one role for each site with the correct read/write permissions set, then you could restrict what gets published using security.

In config set Publishing.CheckSecurity to true

If you set Publishing.CheckSecurity to true, then members of the Sitecore Client Publishing role must have both read and write access in order to publish an item. If you additionally set the Publishing.RequireTargetDeleteRightWhenCheckingSecurity setting in the web.config file to true, then the user must have delete access in the item in the target database to publish a deletion.

Of course, if a user belongs to both roles then that still means both sites will be published, you can just publish an item and sub-items

• Use Default or Custom Access Rights to Control Whether Users Can Publish an Item
• Publishing Security Basics