Item deletion and immediate publication in Sitecore 8 and 8.1

February 11, 2016

For a content author familiar with adding content to Sitecore, content creation and editing is straight forward:

1. You edit or create your content

2. You move the content through workflow

3. The content gets published

Depending on your build configuration, your content either gets published immediately (as a consequence of a custom publication action on your workflow) or you sit and wait for a scheduled publish to occur which will make your change live.

For content authors in the latter category, deleting an item will not change their experience. It is really the content authors in the former category, who are used to seeing their changes going live immediately, that receive a different experience.   

In the immediate publication scenario, workflow triggers a publication of the item (and likely its related items and media) when the item reaches the final state of the workflow. The challenge a deletion creates is that it does not go through workflow and therefore does not fire the publication action. As a consequence, a deletion is not immediately published which breaks from the content author's typical experience.

So how does the deletion get published?

1. It gets picked up by a scheduled publication.
2. A user belonging to the sitecore/Sitecore Client Publishing role manually publishes the parent item and all of its children (to include the deleted item in the publication scope).
3. Move the parent item through workflow to force a publication of the children items. This assumes your workflow publication action is configured to publish children items.