Sometimes you need to tell SharePoint Publishing–“Activate Damnit!”

Ok, I’ve run into this enough times, I figured I’d share it.

What

Today’s scenario was that I was using Metalogix Migration Manager (or rather, Content Matrix as it is now called) to move a SharePoint Site Collection to a new farm. During this move, SharePoint Publishing got, er, buggered, for lack of a better word.

My content came across, but no matter what I did, I could not, in the GUI or through tricks in SharePoint Designer (renaming libraries and other garbage suggested out there on the Interweb), I could not enable the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure Feature.

So What

Well, this is a drag.  I can’t have a pages library and layouts, I can’t use navigation and frankly, I don’t like my stuff ‘broken’ either. Just not cricket and not something I like to carry on with me like herpes, er, luggage.  And, I don’t like to lose…

Now What

Here are some of the errors I encountered today, hoping Google helps others find this as well… Note, the errors below depended on what I was trying to do at the time (various other techniques that ultimately didn’t help):

Provisioning did not succeed. Details: Failed to provision all permission settings. OriginalException: The system cannot find the file specified. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070002)

And

Failed to instantiate file "ContentQueryMain.xsl" from module "XSLStyleSheets": The specified list does not exist.

Dude, What’s the Fix?

Note, I’ve come across this in both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 and suspect considering the Feature ID is the same, in 2007 this probably also applies.

1. Take a Backup – I’m not responsible for your data, you are…
2. Stop trying to click Activate in your Site Collection Features Admin for the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature.  As Einstein says, the definition of being a nut job is trying the same thing over and over and expecting the same result…
3. Go to your SharePoint Server’s PowerShell and Deactivate Publishing for your site collection from the PowerShell command line and reactivate it.  It will tell you that it wasn’t activated (gee, that’s what the GUI said too). But if you have ‘remnants’ of publishing kicking around, you’ll need to use the PowerShell equivalent to clean house and then reactivate it. Here goes:

To Deactivate

(Do it, you know you want to and will have to)

stsadm -o deactivatefeature -id f6924d36-2fa8-4f0b-b16d-06b7250180fa -url "http://yoursharepointurl/sites/sitecollection" -force

You’ll no doubt, if you came across this post, get a notice saying it wasn’t enabled… something to the effect of “"Feature ‘f6924d36-2fa8-4f0b-b16d-06b7250180fa’ is not activated at this scope"

To Activate

Ok, time to flip it back on

stsadm -o activatefeature -id f6924d36-2fa8-4f0b-b16d-06b7250180fa -url "http://yoursharepointurl/sites/sitecollection" –force

And Viola!  It’s Activated

Now you can turn on your site publishing feature if you want your /pages library and Navigation should be back as well.

Hope this helps someone.
Sean

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