I have looked through this site for answers to this and there seems to be no clear answer. I have users that are in an AD group and I have also tried giving them design permissions directly. Both of those do not work. The funny thing is when I first created the site both users had editing access using direct design rights - for about 1 hour. Then afterwards they now get an access denied when they try to edit any page on the publishing site. I've tried resetting to default parent site permissions and then giving them direct access, adding them to a sharepoint group with design access, and giving the site owner group direct permissions - design level (and full). All of those do not seem to work.
I had made another site before that uses the team site template and gave direct permissions to one of the same users. She has been able to edit that site with no problems.
Is the publishing site just whacked when you try and give permissions to other users? How can I solve this?
I am not a power-user of SharePoint 2010 (we have Enterprise ed.) so I don't have knowledge of PowerShell scripting. I do have HTML, javascript, CSS, and some ASP experience. Also, I do not have full admin rights the sharepoint instance/farm.
Any help on this would be appreciated.