Exclude particular folder items when published

Question

I am working on Sitecore 9 update 2, I have one folder named Feature and its child folders are Picture, Videos, PDF Files, etc.

When I am publishing 'Feature' folder from Ribbon bar Publish option, it publishes all child folders and its sub-items (Pictures, video, etc) to Web Database.

I don't want to publish any one of the child folder and its sub-items for example Videos folder and its items (video-1, video-2, etc). Are there any options available in the Sitecore user interface to exclude it?

I have tried with Never Publish checkbox and Unpublish date option but its working for the same item not for child items.

Please find attached screenshot for details:

Here I am going to publish Feature folder and its all child items except highlighted folder (1) and its children's.

Answer 1

You can use the Sitecore Publish Exclusion module. It can be downloaded from Sitecore Marketplace.

This module gives you the ability to configure items that needs to be excluded from publish. You could have this configured in Sitecore as shown below, or in an XML configuration file if you do not wish this to be configured through Sitecore. You can also provide additional capabilities to configure this for each publishing target and publish mode – for instance, you may want to exclude certain items only from the publishing target used by your live sites, but not from your staging target. Or you may want to exclude the items from being published for incremental publish, but not when you explicitly publish the item through smart publish or through the auto publish in a workflow.

More information at Sitecore Publish Exclusion Guide

Answer 2

When you want to publish only current item but not sub-items just uncheck checkbox Publish subitems.

If you want to publish only one folder with sub items then you need to check "Never Publish" checkbox for other folders and again need to publish parent folder