I ran into one of those weird errors that just kind of gets under your skin because you think you’ve checked everything.

You’ve all seen Access Denied errors in SharePoint, but have you run into the one where users WITH proper permissions get it when trying to create a list item – in this case Publishing Pages? Very bizarre.

I checked all of the usual suspects, permission inheritance, draft items in Style Library, Master Page Gallery, etc. Nothing. But then when I reached out to the search engines just for giggles, I found this post by Gunnar Peipman which gave me exactly what I needed.

The permissions on the Master Page Gallery are unique, and users need at least “Restricted Read” to create pages. What’s frustrating is if you go into Site Permissions and view the Uniquely Secured Content, Master Page Gallery DOES NOT show up in that list. You’d think it would show you all uniquely secured content, but that’s not the case.

Thanks Gunnar for the short post with the fix!

1.Go to Site Actions -> Site Settings ->Modify all site settings
2.Go to Galleries -> Master pages and page layouts
3.From the list toolbar, select Settings -> Document library settings
4.Select permissions for this document library
5.Add ‘Restricted Read’ access to the required groups.