Branding and Sharepoint Permissions

Hello again!  I'm going to share with you a tricky little situation I got into today.  Maybe not a huge issue for a Sharepoint pro, but was very frightening for me. I'm going to preface this post with a little story to set the mood.  I'm not looking for a ton of sympathy but I just want to put the project I'm working on into perspective for my readers:

First off, I'm working in a LARGE corporate environment that is migrating all business practices to Sharepoint.  WOOHOO!  Easy right?  Well I guess that is why I have a job right now... no one else wants to do it, and we've had two people quit leading up to my hire (within months of eachother none the less).

This project is almost two years over due now, so no rush... we'll be careful this time and try not to fall into the same holes as we have in the last two years.  I've only been here a few months but I can see the wreckage and leftovers from various consultants and ex employees...

Did I mention we don't have a test environment?

Or that I'm the ONLY developer, .NET and/or Web?

So I'm working on Branding, which is how I spend most my days here.  That is, when I'm not being a Sharepoint admin, or publishing content, or running training seminars.  Not bad for a Junior C# developer.  And I'm branding still.  On 3 different MOSS web apps, with 3 different themes of branding.  Javascript running in masterpages doing god knows what?  Look at that!! I take it out and the page runs faster and smoother.  And I dont have any weird disappearing text.  Wonder why that was there in the first place?  I'll never know though, because the amount of original developers still on the project is ZILCH.

Ok enough rambling.  Here is the educational portion of my post.

Everything I've been working on is fairly stable, looks a little better than myself with a hangover, and runs a little smoother than the original implementation of webparts, css, html, etc...

I'm pretty happy and proud of my work thus far.  We're getting ready to permission about 2-3000 users when I get the bright idea to test these permissions with a view only permissioned account.  Brilliant! So I create the account in active directly, permission it up, and go to a landing page on one of our domains. EPIC FAIL.  My "Zone Tabs" web part is all F'd up.  My custom Content Query Web Parts are erroring out. Hmmm...  Wheres the nearest cliff in Manhattan?  Well I guess theres the A train.

I double check my permission 20 times.  Experiment readding webparts, pointing the CQWPs to lists directly.  Tweaking some other crap.

Then it hits me: Don't you have to Publish Master pages in the Master Page Gallery, then Approve them before regular users can see the changes?  Well yea.  So I double check that, and among the 3 domains I missed approving one.  Well turns out that isn't the problem anyway.  Turns out, my custom .XSL files for my CQWPs need to published as well.  As do a few CSS files I had laying around in my Styles Libraries.  GRRR

So after lots of frustration and near suicidal moments, I was able to remedy this.  (Note to readers:  I am not suicidal, but I am a binge eater, drinker, and sleeper.  So there may have been a bit of that.  I am fairly stable overall.)  Lastly, be sure to PUBLISH and then APPROVE everything in your base Galleries, ie MasterPage, CSS, XSL... It will save you a lot in the end!