No Create functionality available under SharePoint[Site Lock]

Recently we noticed that one of our site collection's site actions menu items has no Create menu. The site actions menu has only View all site content, View Reports and Manage and Content Structure.

This site collection has enabled publishing features.

We found that even Farm admin/Site collection admin are not able to see "Create" menu. When we try to the URL "../_layouts/create.aspx" got access denied error message for every one including Farm admins.

After we did several investigation, we found that the site collection was locked and it was in Read-Only mode.

Solution:

Go to Central Administration > Application Management > Site Collection Quotas and Locks

Select the Site Collection and chose the correct option to unlock the site as below.

Lock status for this site: Not locked

Adding content prevented for Read-only (blocks additions, updates, and deletions) No access

We selected the Option called "Not-Locked" after that it started working fine.

User Unable to Create Page (User has Full Control)

Ran into an odd little issue this morning where users in a publishing site could not create new pages. The reason they couldn’t create a new page turned out to be because they did not have read rights on the masterpage gallery.

The symptoms are basically access denied pages when any user with full control or design rights chooses to create a page in a publishing site. When they create the page they get the typical “Error: Access Denied” page and can either sign in as another user or request access.

I resolved it by going to Site Actions -> Site Settings-> Modify All Site Settings. Select the optionPage layouts and site templates and then select the option to Reset all subsites to inherit these preferred subsite template settings for both subsites and page layouts. This is sort of related to the publishing the default master page; an obvious permission issue.