Office 365 Advent Calendar – 15 Activating Publishing Features on SharePoint Online Sites with PowerShell

Scenario

Activating SharePoint’s Publishing features can easily be done on a single site collection or site. But what if you need to activate Publishing on a hierarchy of subsites, or across multiple site collections?

Code

Once again, we’re using the PnP PowerShell cmdlets.

First some basics. The ‘main’ feature to activate is the PublishingSite feature on the Site Collection level. After you connected to a site collection (Connect-PnPOnline), you can activate it as follows:

Enable-PnPFeature -Identity f6924d36-2fa8-4f0b-b16d-06b7250180fa -Scope Site

The -Scope Site parameter is important, as the default for this parameter is set to Web, and the feature wouldn’t get activated without specifying it correctly.

Once that’s done, we can activate the PublishingWeb feature for the current site (on a Web scope):

Enable-PnPFeature -Identity 94c94ca6-b32f-4da9-a9e3-1f3d343d7ecb