Forum Discussion
SharePoint Can I prevent my content editors from editing Home Page?
Account_No_1001 You have a couple of simple options to get that outcome. One thing you could do is turn on page approval. It wouldn’t prevent news authors from editing the home page itself, but it might make you feel more comfortable. Another option is to create a completely separate site for news authors to use to publish the news you want people to consume on the home site. Give them edit rights to that site. Then, on the home site, choose that “news only site” as the source of the news web part. This will separate permissions the way you want, but you probably want to make the “news only” site an organization news site so that it gets the super powers that come with that type of site. But, what you will need to consider with this approach is that following the home site will NOT include the news published on that other site. So, users will need to know to follow the news site to get notifications when new posts are added.
Account_No_1001 Yep, I knew that, but the other thing you can do is make unique permissions for the home page - so that they don't have edit rights to just that page. But I hate to recommend that approach because breaking permissions on pages usually comes back to haunt you in unexpected ways!! But, technically, every page can have unique permissions even if I don't think it's a good idea. That basically means you can change the permissions on the home page to remove Edit permissions from the Member group. That way, your editors can add new pages that are news or durable pages but they can't edit the home page.
That's what we are going to go with.
I discovered that with unique permissions on Home Site, I can still access the lovely menu (screenshot in question) from News WEBPART. That's where we are going to direct our Content Editors to.
Alternatively, a news post "For Editors" linked with audience targeting on the site.
It's gonna be a few months before we are going to get broader feedback outside of our guinea pig group and test it live, but for now that's what our selected content editors liked and that's the decision we are going with.
P.S.
I agree the unique permissions can bite back in unexpected places, but there is only so much time for testing every single feature so I have to live with it, and expect the unexpected 🙂