Forum Discussion
Strange Auto-Publishing Behavior in a Homesite
I have a client who is having the strangest behavior on their homesite. If they go to add a news article - whether from the News web part or from the + New drop-down menu, once the news post page is provisioned, it is automatically publishing. The link to the blank page appears in their web part and the news post they are editing does not have a Publish button on it. The same thing is happening when you create a normal site page also.
To try to work around this, they created a new page and selected the checkbox for Save as a personal draft first. Once they finished adding their content, there was no button to publish it in any way. Then they used the Managed Access option on the individual page to attempt to make it viewable in the News web part. It does appear in the news web part on their homepage BUT it is only a gray box with the page title at the top that is linked to the article. I have checked to be sure the page is a "Promoted page" - and it is.
I have never seen this in any tenant before and cannot replicate it in any of the 3 other tenants I have access to. As of right now, we are only aware of it happening on the intranet home page which is a homesite and a hub site. It worked as expected until this week as far as we can tell. Is anyone else having this issue? Has Microsoft pushed out an update that broke homesites or News web parts on homesites?
2 Replies
Microsoft has changed the process, maybe it has an impact to your behaviour.
From an Microsoft article https://support.microsoft.com/office/create-and-use-modern-pages-on-a-sharepoint-site-b3d46deb-27a6-4b1e-87b8-df851e503dec?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004845 :
Note: Instead of Save as draft , you may see Save and close in the command bar. This means your organization has pages coauthoring capability where you can invite other authors to edit the same page or news post at the same time. You can learn more about that here .
You can find more details about Co-Authroing in this article: https://support.microsoft.com/office/collaborate-on-sharepoint-pages-and-news-with-coauthoring-91d7dc25-37c3-44a4-99da-f552e0f9cfe9?WT.mc_id=DX-MVP-5004845
Best, Dave
Hi DaveMehr365
Thank you for the suggestion, but that isn't the problem. I am aware of the change to Save and close because of co-authoring now available on SharePoint pages. This is where once you literally create the page it is getting published. Period. If you create a news page it is getting added on its own to the news web part. If you edit the page that the news web part is on by changing the layout of the news web part - and you have not hit the Save and close or the Republish button . . . it changes on the page for all users. This isn't normal behavior for SharePoint. Normally, if you create a new news post as a private draft, it will give you a button for "Post and send" for when you are ready to publish. That isn't happening here. I watched my user do this. That button is grayed out. Save and close is grayed out also. However, any changes they make are posted.
This morning I tested this out again. When you select create a news post (a normal one, not a private draft) the button says "Update news" - which is what you should see AFTER you have published it the first time. And when in Edit mode for the page, the "Save and close" is grayed out.
There have been no changes to this homesite so this makes absolutely no sense when it has been working just fine for several years now. I'm open to other suggestions if you have them.
Regards, Karen
