www.sharepointmythbuster.com

Whoever does not know this one is going to love this gem. Ever tried editing a publishing enabled page using SharePoint Designer? Then you're familiar with that wonderful error message about not being able to edit the page using SPD and you're asked to either edit the underlying publishing layout or the content using the browser.

But what about those tricky web parts on the page? You actually wanted to edit them using SPD, because it is much simpler and you can do loads of wonderful things like connect them across pages and edit many properties which are not available via the browser.
The magic trick is to open up the site in SP Designer and right click on the page in question in the folder view. In the context menu you will find an option to disconnect the page from the page layout. That will effectively merge the content and layout page into a standalone page, which from then on is not affected by any edits on the underlying page layout anymore. It will now behave like a standard wss page and you can customise the individual webparts.
And once you have finished your customisations simply reattach the layoutpage again (right click on the page in the tree). As long as you only touch the webparts and make no changes to the underlying html, which was merged from the layout, it will work like a charm. Any changes outside of the webpart zones will be lost in the reattach process though.