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content-management-systemsitecorepublishing

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

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.

Solution

  • 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.