Turn off publishing feature without messing up the SharePoint site

Question

Hi,
Is it possible to turn off the publishing feature (after it was turned on), without goofing up the SharePoint site and creating problems?  I want to save a site as a template and just discovered that that option is not available when publishing is enabled. 
Why does Microsoft make these decisions arbitrarily?  Ugh!
Thanks! Patti N.

Answer 1

There are many ways to tweak and achieve the target i.e. saving publishing site as template, but if you try creating a new site using that template on a non-publishing site, it will surely gonna fail with some generic error
Even if you deactivate the ft and then save site as template, it will fail when you try creating another site using that template on a non-publishing site. So basically, it can only create a new site using that template only if the destination site have
the publishing ft activated
SharePoint does not support Save Site as Template option with the Publishing features turned on. The supported method to create templates for publishing sites is to use a site definition template and using a feature XML.
Please refer:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2492356?wa=wsignin1.0
To answer your question, Why does Microsoft make these decisions arbitrarily?
when you activate the Publishing ft is the ability to use Web Content Management and create custom Page Layouts and change the way you can mange and display the information.You can manage Content and how this content will be shared to all users, you can
work with Content types and associate with Pages to change and categorize you information and display to public, i use for SharePoint internet Site because is a very easy way to users create new content and display to public this information, there
another features you can use with publishing feature like active the Output Cache this feature will improve performance in the page load because the webpart, metadata and page will be stored in cache, you can also define if you want to manage the
profiles for this cache, anonymous access or authenticated users.
All these changes happen when you activate publishing ft and wont get revert when you deactivate the feature, Hence it is not possible
To know more about publishing ft, please refer
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628963(v=office.14).aspx