Access Denied – Enabling Publishing Features in SharePoint

This is kind of of a weird error and it didn't make sense to me at first (still doesn't really). The best workaround I could find on the net was to temporarily change the application to run in the application pool of the central admin site.

Steps:

1. Change the AppPool for the app to be the same as the Central Admin site (Home Directory tab in IIS website properties).
2. Reset IIS or at the very least do an %systemroot%\system32\iisapp.vbs /a "apppoolname" /r (not sure if the iisapp.vbs method will work but cant see why not).
3. Activate the publishing infrastructure.
4. Set the app pool back to normal.
5. repeat step 2.

Enjoy!

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