User has correct permissions for subsite, but access is denied?

Question

I have a site in SharePoint 2013 with 12 subsites. All but one inherit permissions from the top site. The subsite with unique permissions is named "General".

This subsite has 2 new groups:

• "Visitors of General": Read only and view only permissions
• "Members General": Edit permissions

I added a dummy user account to both these groups, yet the dummy can't access the subsite. The dummy can however access the top site, just not the subsites (none of them, not even the ones that inherit permissions from the top site).

Can someone tell me what I'm missing here? I don't know what is wrong, the user has been added to the groups and should be able to see the subsite "General", yet the access is still denied.

Answer 1

Are you using a Publishing site? If so please check if the Dummy user has access to all lists and libraries in the top level site (check if there is no inheritance broken in any of the lists). For example, if you are creating a subsite with the same master page as parent's, the user must have access to masterpage library, in other case you will get the error (by the way, all the master pages are stored in top level site)

This is my approach, just check permissions in top level site and check out if that works.

Answer 2

As stated in my last comment: it turned out I didn't publish a certain page layout as a major version. After doing so, the access denied no longer happens.

Answer 3

Yes, You need to publish each and everything you have used in a site from external. Once you publish you can share your site and access from any account depending on permission.