Moving onto public facing record producers. Everything I'm going through here I found in other places, but this is kind of a roundup of all the information in one place. First, I went through the step of cloning and page routing sc_cat_item to get a public facing Catalog page. Adding a Record Producer record itself to be displayed in this new page is the same as adding for an internal portal.
Once the record was saved, I needed to add an Available For criteria that granted access to the public role.
The next step was to add the variables. As each was added, the permissions needed to be set to include the public role. This was done for every variable added to the form.
Doing all of that got us a working record producer that could be accessed by a public user. However, to actually submit the form, we needed to tweak the Scripted REST API for service catalog. This was needed as the script is set up to Require Authentication by default. Inside the Submit a Record Producer step, it was just a matter unchecking 'Requires authentication'. As part of activating all the different portals I could find , one of the portals had a public facing record producer out of box that did this step when the plugin was added.
And just like that, all of the setup for the record producer was complete to allow the public to submit records.
