Features of a SharePoint Online Publishing Site

A SharePoint publishing site is a site that’s built using the Publishing Portal Site Template or Enterprise Wiki Template. The publishing portal site template is highly structured and enables you to control page layouts, authoring practices, and publishing schedules. The enterprise wiki is less structured and is intended for easy authoring when formal content management processes are not required.

Before you can create a publishing site, the publishing infrastructure feature must be activated at the top-level site in your collection. Once publishing features are activated, sub-sites inherit them automatically.

Activating the publishing infrastructure feature

Navigate to Site Settings page. You can get there by clicking Site Actions/Site Settings in the left upper corner of any of the sites in your collection.
Under Site Collection Administration, click Site collection features.
On the Site Collection Administration Features page, scroll down to SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure and click Activate.

Publishing features

So what are the features that come with a publishing site? Some are prominent on the ribbon and immediately obvious, but others require a little more sleuthing as they are visible only through the links on the Site Settings page or in galleries or libraries. This post will guide you through the features that are available once publishing is enabled in a SharePoint Online site collection.

Note: This information does not apply to customers using Office 365 for Professional and Small Businesses.

Navigation and Ribbon

If you’re familiar with team sites, you’ll notice right away that a publishing site has no Quick Launch menu. The Quick Launch menu has been replaced by the current navigation menu, which usually sits on the side of the page in most web sites:

The image above is from a site built with the Publishing Portal Site Template. You’ll notice that these kinds of sites have no top link bar. Enterprise wiki pages retain the top link bar:

When editing a page, in the Edit group of the Format Text tab on the ribbon you’ll find Check In/Check Out buttons that allow you to edit the page content while maintaining version control. This feature is available on both the Publishing Portal and Enterprise Wiki.

On sites built with the Publishing Portal Site Template you’ll find a new tab called Publish, and on that tab are Submit, Approve, and Reject buttons. These are all part of the approval workflow that ensures nothing is published on your site without the approval of designated reviewers. Clicking Submit kicks off the workflow by routing the current page to one or more approvers for review.

The Scheduling button opens a dialog box where you can specify when the page should be published and when, if ever, it should be retired.

Lists and Libraries

When you enable the publishing infrastructure feature, new lists and libraries are added to your publishing site at the site collection level:

Content and Structure Reports list. Used to customize the queries that appear in the View list in the Site Content and Structure tool
Reusable Content list. Contains HTML or text content that can be inserted into Web pages
Site Collection Documents library. Stores documents that are used throughout the site collection
Site Collection Images library. Stores images that are used throughout the site collection.

In addition, three libraries have been added at the site level for storing site content:

Pages library. Stores site pages
Images library. Holds images used on site pages
Documents library. Contains all documents used on site pages

Web Parts

Publishing sites include a variety of web parts that enable authors to insert video, rich text, forms, and dynamic content onto a site page. These four Web Parts, which are unique to publishing sites, are available at the site collection level and for all sub-sites in the site collection:

Content Query Web Part. Displays a dynamic view of content on your site based on a query you build within the properties pane of the web part
Media Web Part. Used to embed media clips (video and audio) in a web page
Summary Links Web Part. Allows authors to create links that can be grouped and styled
Table of Contents Web Part. Used to automatically generate a site map that point to various parts of your site collection

Master Pages, Page Layouts, Content Types, and Columns

Master pages and page layouts dictate the overall look and feel of your SharePoint site. Master pages contain controls that are shared across multiple page layouts, such as navigation, search, or language-preference for multilingual sites. Page layouts contain field controls and Web Parts. Page layouts and master pages work together to create the layout for a web page.

In a publishing site, the master page is updated to include a Publishing tab, which is where you find the scheduling and workflow buttons shown earlier in this post. Along with the updated master page come the following:

Item	Description
Content types	Article Page, Project Page, Welcome Page, Enterprise Wiki Page, and Redirect Page. Two additional content types, Reusable HTML and Reusable Text, are added specifically for the Reusable Content list.
Page layouts	Image on Left, Image on Right, and Splash. These page layouts are automatically associated with the content types mentioned above when the publishing features are enabled.
Columns	Page layout columns are Byline and Page Content. Publishing columns added at the site collection level are Article Date, Scheduling Start Date, and Scheduling End Date. A custom Wiki Categories column that uses managed metadata for Wiki pages is also added at the site collection level.

Users and Permissions

With the publishing site comes Approvers, Designers, Hierarchy Managers, Restricted Readers, and Style Resource Readers groups so you can assign users to specific publishing-related roles. In addition, three permissions levels are added to the site collection: Approve, Manage Hierarchy, and Restricted Read. By default, sites that are created below the site collection use the groups and permission levels from the parent site.

Themes

In a publishing site, the Inherit Theme and Apply Theme sections are added to the Site Theme page (the Site Theme page is listed under Look and Feel on the Site Settings page.) These options allow you to specify whether a site should inherit the theme from the parent site or use its own theme. You can apply the selected theme only to the current site or to the current site and all sites below it in the site hierarchy.

As you can see, a lot goes on behind the scenes once you enable the publishing features on your site collection. For more information about publishing features, see Publishing features overview (SharePoint Server 2010).

Tricia