How to Fix the Cannot Save as Draft Issue with a SharePoint Blog Site

I was recently working with someone who wanted an overview of SharePoint Blog Sites.

We setup the SharePoint Blog Site in our sandbox site collection (where I was acting as Site Collection Administrator and they were acting as Full Control Site Owner). We quickly noticed that the “Save as Draft” button was disabled.

While I am the first to admit that I don’t have every “gotcha” in the SharePoint space memorized, I can comfortably “play detective” and troubleshoot our way to the answer.

The first thing we did was to check the List Settings (as a SharePoint Blog Site uses a series of lists wired together to manage the posts, categories, and comments.

That is when I remembered that we needed to go into the Versioning Settings to change the Item Version History to Yes to create a version each time you edit an item in the list.

This will activate the “Save as Draft” button that was previously grayed out.

Now there are more settings to change if you want blog posts “set to be approved by site approvers before being published.”(Content Approval and Publishing), but we’ll leave that for another post.

Fast Answer: Manage posts > List Settings > Versioning Settings > Item Version History = Yes

The solution I found was on the Microsoft Answers website in the SharePoint community under the “Sharepoint blog owner cannot save as draft” post. Thank you to Cliff Gu (Microsoft Agent & Moderator) for posting such a clear solution!