How to provide anonymous access to your web content

It's sometimes so frustrating to see that some thing which you have already done once is giving you a hard time doing again.

This is exactly what I faced today. I have configured anonymous access to the web content for my site and have configured Web Content Viewer portlet for anonymous access in my devl environment. But when I tried the same thing today in Production, it's just not working. After so many tries looking for the solution what I found, is a small mistake which cost me dearly.

This has again inspired me to put this thing on papaer to make my life easy. So, for all you people out there who are also into such kind of scenarios, here is a quick note on how to assign anonymous access to web content.

Steps:

1. Create a copy of the "Web Content Viewer" portlet and rename it to whatever name you like.
2. Add "Anonymous Portal User" into the user role of the portlet.
3. Add "Anonymous Portal User" into the user role of your content library.
4. If point -3 doesn't suits to your access policy, then atleast make sure that you need to have user access for "Anonymous Portal User" on every item in the path to the current content item. i.e. library/site/site area/content item and ofcourse on the Authoring Template and presentation Template.
5. Modify the Edit Shared Settings in the portlet and configure the content item to be displayed.

Hope this helps to some extent when you really need it. :)