A common occurrence within Sitecore's Publishing feature... You have an item that you created with Sitecore. Say a News article. You've finished all your changes, you Published it... and it's not there. It simply refuses to appear. Why not?

There are many reasons why that could happen. But 98% of the time you will find the cause within one the following sections of your Standard Fields: Lifetime and Publishing.

First let's start with making sure that we can see the Standard Fields. From the Sitecore menu, click View. Make sure the Standard Fields checkbox is checked.

Now let click on the Item that is not being published. Below the custom created sections and fields, there will be a list of Sitecore Standard Fields. Among those are the Lifetime and Publishing sections.

Let's take them one at a time.

The Lifetime Section is used to hold the publication restrictions for individual versions of an item. It contains three fields. The "Valid From" and "Valid To" fields control when a given version of the Item is valid for publication. Set those to a date in the past or future and the Item may not be published now. The "Hide Version" checkbox controls whether to hide the current version you're seeing from publication. If checked, it won't publish at all.

The Publishing Section is used to hold the publishing restrictions for the Item as a whole. It contains four fields. The "Publish" field lets you select a date/time to start publishing the item and the "Unpublish" field when to stop publishing it. If these are set they could cause your Item not to be published, if set in the past/future.

The "Never Publish" field should be self-explanatory. It is sometimes used when an Item is still in raw stages of development and the editors don't want to risk it going out to the public. Forget to check it off and the Item is never published.

Finally there's the "Publishing Targets" field. You can define which targets your item is allowed on. Check the "Staging" target, for example and you'll never see it in "Production."

Of course, there are many other reasons. The item could have an error in one of its fields, be stuck in a workflow waiting for approval, forgot to publish to the right target, etc., etc. I've found those to be rare. I used to check for all the others and check for the Lifetime/Publishing sections last. Not anymore. Now it's the first place I look.