Missing Publish Tab on Custom Publishing Pages

For some unknown reasons the Publish tab disappeared on some custom page layouts. I did get all the options under the “Page” tab including the “Check Out/Check In” buttons. The interesting part is that the Publish tab showed on other custom page layouts and there were no issues a day before.

I could still approve the pages by navigating to the “All Site Content” >> Pages, by selecting Publish from the drop-down menu when hovering over the pages. That told me the Publishing feature worked just fine.

By-the-way, for this instance, I was using SharePoint 2010 “Publishing Site” template without the Workflow. So, the only thing should show under Publish tab is the “Publish” button or if the page is already published “Unpublish” button.

So, I started to dig through the “Site Settings” to discover after couple of intense and frustrating hours that the Page versioning settings were wrong for that particular Page library. Something or someone change the settings.

Here are the steps I followed to get the Publishing tab back.
Go to one of the pages the Publish tab would not show and hit the “Site Actions” >> “Manage Content and Structure”. Click on the Pages list library and on the menu click on Settings drop-down and select “List Settings”.

Under “General Settings” click on “Versioning settings” link. Make sure you have these two options selected: “Create major and minor (draft) versions” and “Only users who can edit items” and hit OK.