Occasionally you may experience publishing problems. Although you save and publish a page in the Umbraco admin panel, the node might not become available on the public website. Often this happens spuriously and some pages remain visible, and others not - leading to very confusing troubleshooting.
Fix 1:
Issue: Umbraco is unable to work with the large XML file containing all the published nodes of your site. This usually needs to be done after transferring all the site files from the development machine to the hosting server.
How to fix: Simply remove the umbraco.config file in the /data/ folder. Umbraco will automatically regenerate this cached XML file when you revisit your site. If it does not recreate it automatically you need to check the permissions (ie, the user the Umbraco application pool runs under - maybe the Network Service, has full read/write permissions to the Umbraco folder)
Fix 2:
Issue: There has been a random bug in some builds of Umbraco whereby the rich text editor is allowing certain characters (in a variety of character sets) to get entered - which although the database supports, when it comes to Umbraco creating the standard XML umbraco.config file - are not supported, thereby stopping full publishing. This can result in page not found errors, despite the page actually being published. Often this error is as a result of pasting text in from other programs (Notably: Adobe InDesign {wiki: others...}) that are using a variety of character sets.
How to fix:
The way to fix this issue is to find the page that has the problematic characters within and either delete it, or remove the problem characters. The quickest way to find the pages with the bad characters is to open up the Umbraco site database in SQL Server Management Studio Express and issue the following query:
select distinct contentNodeId, path, text
from cmsPropertyData
inner join umbracoNode on umbracoNode.id = cmsPropertyData.contentNodeId
where dataNtext like '%�%'
This should give you a list of nodes which have the bad characters - you can then fix them accordingly. After which, delete the umbraco.config file mentioned above and then do a full site re-publish (right-click the root node in the Umbraco admin panel and select publish).