Allowing anonymous access to sub-sites?

Question

I want to open the site up for public viewing, which I've done by going Site Permissions -> Anonymous Access -> Entire Web Site

The problem is, I have some sub-sites because I wanted a drop down navigation, but none of those can be accessed anonymously - they don't show in the navigation area, and if I try to go directly to a page when not logged on, it'll ask for login details and then throw up a '401 UNAUTHORIZED' error.

I've tried going into the permissions of the sub-site, and it says it's inheriting permissions from the parent site, but it mentions nothing about anonymous access! :(

Any help would be much appreciated, thank you

Answer 1

This is typical when the site collection is a publishing site.

Check out http://blogs.msdn.com/b/russmax/archive/2010/01/22/lockdown-mode-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

To determine if a site has ViewFormPagesLockdown enabled run the following:

get-spfeature -site http://sitecollectionURL

If ViewFormPagesLockDown is listed, it's enabled.

To toggle lockdown mode to off:

$lockdown = get-spfeature viewformpageslockdown

disable-spfeature $lockdown -url http://sitecollectionURL

If anonymous is already setup, you may need to disable\re-enable anonymous on the site.

HTH