SharePoint Online – How to enable customization and publishing features

Hi Techies,

Today, in this blog I’m going to describe the process, where we can enable customization and publishing features on a new SharePoint online tenant. On a new tenant, publishing features are not activated by default and because of this, when are creating a new site collection and tries to customize it, we receiving errors on SharePoint designer or couldn’t find some links such as “Design Manager”. This is one essential OOB functionality, which allow for customization. So, let’s get to the following steps to see, how we can enable these essential customization features.

Step-1: Enable SharePoint Designer.

To customizing master page or page by using SharePoint designer it should be enabled under SharePoint Designer Setting. To enable navigate to Site Settings > SharePoint Designer Settings. It can be found under Site Collection Administration.

Fig 1: SharePoint Designer Settings

Enable customizing master pages and page layouts.

Fig 2: Enable customizing master pages and page layouts.

Step-2: Activate SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure.

This feature provides centralized libraries, content types, master pages and page layouts and enables page scheduling and other publishing functionality for a site collection.

To activate the feature, navigate to Site Settings > Site collection features. It can be found under Site Collection Administration.

Fig 3: Site collection features

Search for SharePoint server publishing infrastructure and activate it.

Fig 4: SharePoint server publishing infrastructure

Step-3: Result

Once, these settings and features are enabled/activated, the master page can be edited with SharePoint designer and design manager link will be available on site settings page.

Fig 5: Design Manager

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