"A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing."
These are the words of Blake, Alec Baldwin's character in the movie version of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104348), as he talks to (more like rants) a group of real estate salesmen about the art of deal. This scene popped into my head a few days ago as I was working on a customized Internet-facing publishing site in MOSS. Why? Because when it comes to getting new content into your publishing site, it's "A-B-P. Always Be Publishing."
Why is this important? If you don't, your updates won't show up and your rank and file users won't be able to see them, it's just that simple. MOSS's content management system for publishing sites is configured so that unless your content has been checked in, published, and approved it will not be visible to anyone not in your site's authoring or approval groups.
If you're editing content in a MOSS publishing site (often used for Internet facing websites), always make sure that you have published all of your updates. This includes, but is not limited to, changes to your master pages, page layouts, pages, lists, web parts, and much more. If you are working on items that require approval, you must confirm that workflows for those approvals have been started and completed in order for them to be visible to all of your site's users. (NOTE: with publishing sites you can also schedule content to start and end on specified dates, which also change the visibility of your content)
How do you do that? There are a few different techniques I recommend using; you should try to do at least one of them every time you update your site and should probably do most of them together.
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Use the MOSS Check for Unpublished Items tool:
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Make sure the Authoring Toolbar is displayed for your site (you should see a menu across the top of the page showing the page's version, status, publication start date and some pulldown menus)
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Click the Tools pulldown menu and select the Check for Unpublished Items option.
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You will see a message in the Authoring Toolbar saying that it is checking for unpublished items.
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If there are any, you will see a message stating !Unpublished items are detected on the page. In the message, click the link full report to open a report of the items found.
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For each item in the list, initiate the publishing process so that they can be displayed to all users
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Log in as an anonymous user, or as a user with limited rights to the site. Then check the page for your new content. If you don't see it, it needs to be published. One trick I like to use is to make my updates in Internet Explorer and verify my content as an anonymous user in a different browser, like FireFox. This allows me to make sure everything's getting published and at the same time make sure that things look good in non-IE browsers as well.
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Andrew Connell's STSADM Custom Commands (
http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossStsadmWcmCommands.aspx) includes an option to publish all items in a list, which is great when you've just uploaded a ton of documents or images into a list or directory and don't want to have to go through every single workflow for every single item. Just point the tool at the list and it will publish them all for you (NOTE: you will need to be a SharePoint administrator to install and run the tool).
So the next time you're authoring your MOSS publishing site and can't figure out why your new content isn't showing up for your users, check to make sure it's published. And put that coffee down. Coffee's for publishers only.