Sitecore Quick Tip: Disable Full Site Publishing

Full site publishing can be an expensive operation that not only locks out other users from publishing until its completed… but may publish items that are not ready for publish (please use Sitecore Workflows so content is always approved and marked as ready for publish to avoid the second case).

With that said, here are some steps to lock down full site publish access from your users.

Create a Custom Content Author Role

While Sitecore has a built in Content Author role, it’s always preferred from a Governance perspective to use a “Roles of Roles” approach where you create custom roles comprised of the desired built-in roles.

This prevents your core roles from being modified away from their intent but still allows you flexibility to assign your custom role with any subset of roles you want for your content authors including granular security as we are about to apply.

Remove Publish Site from the Sitecore Desktop

The first of the two areas we want to remove full site publishing from is the Sitecore Desktop.

This requires modifying the custom role you created above and using Security Editor for granular permissions.

Open Sitecore Desktop and Select the Core Database

Open Security Editor and Select Your Custom Role

Open Security Editor from the Start Menu (Sitecore Icon in lower left) and select your Custom Role.

Remove Publish Site from the Left Menu

Browse the Content Tree path in the Security editor at the following path:

sitecore>content>Documents and settings>Start menu>Left>Publish Site

Click the x next to Read to remove Publish Site from being visible in the Sitecore Desktop.

Remove Publish Site from the Publish Ribbon Section

The second place to remove Publish Site is from the Publishing Button in the Publish section of the Ribbon.

This requires the same steps as the previous section where you modified your custom Content Author role, except this time, we are selecting a different part of the Content Tree within the Security Editor.

Remove Publish Site from the Content Editor Menu

Browse the Content Tree path in the Security editor at the following path:

sitecore>content>Applications>Content Editor>Menues>Publish>Publish Site

Click the x next to Read to remove Publish Site from being visible in the Publishing Button dropdown within the Publish section of the Ribbon.