Sitecore item not publishing due to a field in Lifetime section

A perplexing issue once stumped a content author trying to publish an item. No matter what she tried—unchecked "Never Publish," correct language settings, valid publish dates, approved workflow states—the page just wouldn't go live. Even after clearing browser and CDN caches, the item remained elusive in the web database.

I started looking at the item hoping that content author may have missed something but everything looked normal. I also jumped into publishing logs and each time it said that the item published successfully. I opened Sitecore with web db selected and on navigating in the content tree, I did not see the item. This was confusing but interesting. There is probably something which I have not touched before and it impacts an item's publishing.

Upon closer inspection, a rarely used field, "Hide Version in Lifetime," held the key. This obscure setting, tucked away in the depths of the item's properties, was silently thwarting all publishing attempts. Who knew such a small checkbox could cause such big headaches? Lets learn about it little bit.

The Lifetime section

The Lifetime section of the standard template contains fields for managing publishing restrictions at the version level. Sitecore manages item-level publishing restrictions in fields within the Publishing section of the standard template.

__Valid to (Sitecore.FieldIDs.ValidTo): The date after which publishing operations will remove the version from publishing target databases.

__Hide version (Sitecore.FieldIDs.HideVersion): Prevents publishing of the version to publishing target databases.

__Valid from (Sitecore.FieldIDs.ValidFrom): Date after which publishing operations will remove the version from publishing target databases.

In our case, the Hide version checkbox is checked on the __Standard Values item of the template

We unchecked Hide version checkbox and the publishing worked. Hope it helps you!

Comments

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