I have updated my Sitecore Power Publish module, now simply called “Power Publish”. The module is now tested up to Sitecore XP 8.0 Update 1 and I have also tested the compatibility of the module towards workflows. The module still works great up to Sitecore version 8 and it respects workflow states in the same way as it respects the publishing restrictions of an item. I will explain the functionality accompanied with new screenshots briefly in this post.

A quick introduction

First of all, you can publish an item with a single click, regardless if it is Publishable or not (only at the item level). This “Power Publish” button will also publish all related content, even if it is located in a newly created folder you forgot to publish:

Unpublish an item by simply clicking the new Unpublish button. Your item will be removed from all publishing targets by making it Unpublishable in the Publish Restrictions modal, after which it is ‘published’ to ship the new publishing state to all publishing targets:

And whenever you’re curious if an item is published, simply open the Publishing State dropdown created by this module. It will show you all publishing targets together with a green, orange or red dot. If a publishing target has a green dot, the latest version of the content is published to that target. An orange dot indicates that it is present in the corresponding publishing target, but not with an up-to-date version (there has been some changes since the latest publishing action on this item). If the dot is red, this item is not present in that target at all:

Of course, hiding this functionality in a dropdown requires a user action to display this information, but there is a good reason for not displaying this information in the gutter for example. Or actually I have two reasons for that.

First of all, if you have one publishing target, you could easily represent the publishing state with a single icon in the Sitecore gutter, but this wouldn’t be a scalable solution. I wanted the module to be able to distinguish publishing states between publishing targets, so the gutter wasn’t an option. And secondly, checking the publishing state of an item in all publishing targets takes some time and I wouldn’t want to slow up your client by checking all items all the time. Having a dropdown to your disposal, you can request the information only when you need it.

But Sitecore 8 already offers a way to publish related content, right?

Yes, it does indeed, but besides the unpublish button and the publishing state information my module offers, there is an extra feature hidden in the publishing of related content as well. Since I often saw (new) content editors forgot to publish a parent folder of newly uploaded media for example, my module garantuees the items are published by publishing all items in the path towards it as well.

More information

The updated module is now available on the Sitecore Marketplace. You can also visit my GitHub repository, which carries the installable as well as the complete source code of the module.