Sitecore child items not getting published

Question

I have a folder item which contains multiple child items. These child items' template had a field added to them. The child items were published using before the addition of the field. The template was published with the new field. The items were also published after data was entered into the fields using Smart Publish.

The publish went fine for some of the items. The other items were not published. It's like majority of the items were skipped. When I published the items manually they all published fine.

Some of the items that were not published were stuck in workflow. But the other items, I do not have a clue about.

What could be causing this issue? Any tips are welcome.

Thanks

Answer 1

Do you know about this solution?

Click on your "Auto Publish" action -> Check the value for "Parameters:" field (found in "Data" field-section that comes under Content Tab)

Please click here to view this as a screenshot

The deep parameter that specifies whether or not the child items should be published.

when deep=1 — publish children.
when deep=0 — do not publish children.

NOTE:
1. Obviously, this solution is only for those who have assigned workflow to their items
2. View the screenshot image to know in what format input is supposed to be given for Parameters field
3. I'm using Sitecore 8.2 Xperience Platform
4. Refer :https://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore6/workflowreference-usletter.pdf (Go to Page Number.15 / Section 3.2.2 Auto Publish Action )

Hope it helps!
Please do let me know.... Thanks!

Answer 2

I'm sure someone at the Denmark office is gritting their teeth to hear this, but I'm pretty sure I speak for more than just a few Sitecore developers when is say that Smart Publish just cannot be trusted. I doubt it's a proper bug, but the situation is intricate enough it can be impossible to cover every funny exception hiding in the rules.

As another answer alluded to, publishing restrictions and warnings are just two out of a hundred different things that can trip it up. Republish is the only way to fly, especially when it's a question of recently added fields to a base template.

In one Sitecore instance I worked on, the flakiness of Smart Publish was such an annoyance to users that I set up what was essentially a Republish command to fire on item save for all but super users. This added a half-second lag on save, but there were no more sync problems after that.

Answer 3

Publishing Restrictions springs to mind as one option. If an item is restricted from publishing (would normally show as a warning in the Content Editor), the child items of that item would not get published.

The question is fairly broad though ;-)