There are four selections that enable SharePoint Designer 2010 restrictions and there are two Web pages where this can be controlled. Both Web page locations have the same controls but they behave differently:

1.       Central Administration: Restricts what the site collection administrator may do.

2.       Site Collection Administration: Affects what the site owners and designers may do.

SharePoint Designer Controls are listed with risks and mitigation. List items 2-4 are the most common reasons for sites that are negatively impacted when customizing with SharePoint Designer:

1.    Enable SharePoint Designer

Risk: When SharePoint designer is enabled, users with designer, site owner, or site administrator have the ability to make changes to SharePoint sites.

Impact: Changes made to SharePoint can be made at any time without approval and/or testing. While the time frame to produce solutions is fast, the probability that issues may arise can be high. Data may not be well structured or time frames to render data may be slow due to slow connection or poorly formed designs.

Mitigation: Reduce the number of people that are able to customize pages using SharePoint Designer. Provide sufficient training before providing access to SharePoint Designer. Test customizations before implementing and use solutions whenever possible. This control is enabled by default.

2.    Enable detaching pages from their site definition

Risk: When a site is opened using SharePoint Designer, you may have the ability to perform advanced customization that can detach it from the site definition.

Impact: Once this is done, pages are no longer ghosted. This means that all site content is retrieved from SharePoint content databases instead of the ghosted page that is loaded in RAM. This over rides the existing content that is stored in the site definition. When an upgrade is performed that includes new content for the site definition, it will not be included with an un-ghosted site, which may cause undetermined issues. Un-ghosted site way also increase SQL Server resources.

Mitigation: Enabling this setting also allows SharePoint Designer users to edit pages in advanced mode as opposed to normal mode. This is done by right clicking a file and selecting “Edit in advanced mode” after opening a site with SharePoint Designer 2010. This is turned off by default. It may be turn on at the site collection level so that site administrators may edit in advanced mode or from central administration so that no users can edit in advanced mode. Consider only turning this on when planned changes are necessary and turning of when changes are complete.

3.   Enable customizing master pages and page layouts

Risk: Users may have the ability to customize pages and page layouts.

Impact: Organizational branding or designs may not match the company look and feel or present data in the manner intended. Required content rendering that has been enforced by the agency or objects that allow the page to render properly can also be deleted.

Mitigation: This setting is turned off by default. It may be turned on for all users from the site collection level or turn on only for the site collection administrator at the central administration level. This control is only effective when the publishing feature is turned on.

4.   Enable managing of the Web site URL structure

Risk: When the All Files option is clicked in SharePoint Designer, from the navigation pane authorized users will see all of the files in your site hierarchy or web site URL structure giving a complete view of everything.

Impact: A user may change or delete a file or delete a name space that is required by the site, which may create issue with the site rendering or loss of content.

Mitigation: This setting is turned off by default. It may be turned on for all users at the site collection level or turn on only for the site collection administrator at the central administration level.

Recommendations for managing SharePoint Designer

• Leverage the governance model in determining whether SharePoint designer should be used. In general, top level sites or publishing sites have tight governance policies in place; whereas, collaboration sites have little governance.
• Consider the qualifications of the user and offer training if necessary.
• Consider leaving the customizations up to the development group.
• Do not let users customize in advanced mode if they are not on the development team.
• Provide a request form for customers so that they may easily place requirements for customization.
• Tier the level of customization and assign roles (e.g. 1 = browser, 2 = SPD normal mode, 3= SPD advanced mode, etc).
• When using SharePoint Designer, execute it against a Web Front End that is not part of the load balancing pool so that resource remains dedicated to users.
• For finer grain restrictions, consider leveraging controls through Group Policy. If Group Policy controls are used in conjunction with SharePoint controls, be sure to test the results more closely before going live.

Powershell Command Builder

1) Open the root of the site collection in SharePoint Designer 2010

2) In the Navigation section, click on All Files, then click _catlogs

3) Check for a folder named "wfpub" and if it exists right click on it and delete it

4) Run the following PowerShell for the site collection having the issue:

$site = Get-SPSite https://root-site-collection-url

Disable-SPFeature -url $site.URL -Identity Workflows -Confirm:$false

Disable-SPFeature -url $site.URL -Identity OffWFCommon -Confirm:$false

Enable-SPFeature -url $site.URL -Identity OffWFCommon

Enable-SPFeature -url $site.URL -Identity Workflows

<style type="text/css">

#s4-leftpanel {
 DISPLAY: none
}
.s4-ca {
 MARGIN-LEFT: 0px
}

</style>

NOTE: I do not recommend doing this if it can be avoided as this does not remove the quick launch column, it only hides it, so alignment of content on the page is still based on the column being there which can make things look strange for centered content. The preferred solution is creating a page based on the blank page layout that does not have quick launch navigation. However, in the real world customers do not always have the time or interest in moving existing content to a new page just to remove this column... hence this workaround. 

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/932744/

This query will scan for all the links in a content databse. Change the “Top Level” text to the actual base URL of the customer’s farm before you run it to make the output look better. Target each content DB you want to scan in SQL management studio and the results should paste nicely into Excel for review.

select 'LOCATION:  Top Level/' + DirName + LeafName + '   LINK:  ' + TargetDirName from AllLinks WITH (NOLOCK)
where TargetDirName LIKE 'https://%'

#########################################
 # Log_Cleanup.ps1                                                       #
 #                                                                                    #
 # Deletes files in target folder                                      #
 # that are older than specified number                        #
 # of days                                                                       #
 #                                                                                   #
 ########################################
 Function LogCleanup
 {
 ############################# Parameters ##########
 ## Delete all files older than this number of days
 $Days = "30"
 
 ## File types to delete
 $FileType = "*.log"
 
 ## Root folders to run cleanup separated by commas
 $TargetFolder = "C:\USAGE_LOG_FOLDER", "C:\SOME_OTHER_FOLDER"
  ## NOTE: Script WILL recurse each subfolder inside these folders
 ########################## End Parameters ##########
 if (Test-Path $TargetFolder)
 {
 $Now = Get-Date
 $LastWrite = $Now.AddDays(-$days)
 $Files = get-childitem $TargetFolder -include $FileType -recurse |Where {$_.LastWriteTime -le "$LastWrite"}
 foreach ($File in $Files)
 {write-host "Deleting file $File" -foregroundcolor "Yellow"; Remove-Item $File | out-null}
 }
 Else
 {Write-Host "Folder $TargetFolder Does not exist! Check folder path"}
 }
 LogCleanup

 I have seen some documentation out there on setting up the Adobe iFilter with SP 2010, but now Microsoft has officially published KB2293357

• Install Windows Server 2008 following the SharePoint prerequisites (Pre-upgrade utility).
• Install SharePoint 2010 with the complete option and run the PSconfig wizard.
• Configure required Server Farm Topology. In this example we use a Single Server Farm.
• Create a new Search Service application.

Configure Adobe iFilter based on steps mentioned below:

1. Install PDF iFilter 9.0 (64 bit) from https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025            (https://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=4025)       
2. Download PDF icon picture from Adobe web site https://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html            (https://www.adobe.com/misc/linking.html)        and copy to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\
3. Add the following entry in docIcon.xml file, which can be found at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\XML
   <Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdf16.gif" />
4. Add pdf file type on the File Type page under Search Service Application
5. Open regedit
6. Navigate to the following location:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office Server\14.0\Search\Setup\ContentIndexCommon\Filters\Extension
7. Right-click > Click New > Key to create a new key for .pdf
8. Add the following GUID in the default value
   {E8978DA6-047F-4E3D-9C78-CDBE46041603}

• Restart the SharePoint Server Search 14
• Reboot the SharePoint servers in Farm
• Create a Test site (with any out-of-box site template) and create a document library upload any sample PDF document(s).
• Perform FULL Crawl to get search result.

Once the crawl is completed we will get search results.

NOTE: If this is a SharePoint Foundation 2010 environment additional steps will be required instead of step 4 above

Adding Searchable File Types to SharePoint Foundation 2010
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2518465            (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2518465)       

1. Copy Project Server 2007 installation files from the CD to a local directory on your hard drive, such as C:\Project2007.
2. Download Office Server 2007 SP2 files from this location: https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b7816d90-5fc6-4347-89b0-a80deb27a082&amp;displaylang=en.
3. Choose the appropriate download for your architecture (32-bit or 64-bit).
4. From the command prompt, extract the update files to a local folder using /extract switch.
           Example: c:\officeserver2007sp2-kb953334-x64-fullfile-en-us.exe /extract:c:\Project2007SP2\
5. Copy the extracted Office Server SP2 files to /Updates directory in the Project Server 2007 installation folder on your hard drive.
6. Download the WSS 3.0 SP2 files from this location: https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=20614
7. From the command prompt, extract the update files to a local folder using /extract switch as you did in step 4
8. Copy the extracted Office Server SP2 files to /Updates directory in the Project Server 2007 installation folder on your hard drive.
9. You can now install Project Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 by running the Setup.exe contained in the Install folder you created in Step 1

Extract all solutions from your farm

(Get-SPFarm).Solutions | ForEach-Object{$var = (Get-Location).Path + "\" + $_.Name; $_.SolutionFile.SaveAs($var)}

** I must note here that utilizing the (Get-Location).Path will drop all the solutions where you currently located in the file system, so ensure to navigate to the appropriate folder before running this command, or modify the command to hard code in the path you need. We do not like hard coded path's therefore we just call our current location.

Import all solutions to another farm

Get-ChildItem | ForEach-Object{Add-SPSolution -LiteralPath $_.Fullname}

** Once again this calls your current location in the filesystem so ensure you navigate to the folder containing your newly exported solutions prior to executing this script.

Deploy all solutions on the new farm

Get-SPSolution | ForEach-Object {If ($_.ContainsWebApplicationResource -eq $False) {Install-SPSolution -Identity $_ -GACDeployment} else {Install-SPSolution -Identity $_ -AllWebApplications -GACDeployment}}

Once this is executed it will take 10 minutes or more for the solutions to deploy, depending on the number of solutions of course. So now you have a programmatic/repeatable method to ensure your farms have identical solutions.

Shane Young also wrote up a blog on this located here. For sake of saving myself some typing, I am just putting the bare bones code here. If you need a detailed explanation of what each command does please visit Shane's blog as he does a great job explaining in detail.