If the publishing feature is enabled on a site in SP 2010, the Save As Template option becomes no longer available. This is because it’s not actually a Microsoft best practice to save Publishing Sites as Templates as there are a number of inherent issues with the process.

If you want to live on the wild side and get ‘er done anyways – get that publishing site saved as a template by appending the following to your base site URL:

/_layouts/SaveTmpl.aspx

..so https://go.site.com/sites/subsite/ becomes https://go.site.com/sites/subsite/_layouts/SaveTmpl.aspx, and you are officially on the side of the rebels.