Site Templates
Site Templates
When MOSS 2007 came out I created a blog post very similar to this one. It turned out to be one of my most popular posts and I received many comments and private emails thanking me for putting the post together. Since the post helped out so many folks I decided to create an updated version for SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 ships with many predefined site templates you may use to create site collections and sub sites. Sometimes the out of the box site templates will meet the needs of your project. Other times, the out of the box site templates may...
This article describes how to create a custom site definition in SharePoint 2010. The process to create a custom site definition has not changed much since the last version of SharePoint, the only differences are the directory names and some of the XML in the WEBTEMP files. See this blog post if you would like to see how this is done in WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007.
Site Definition basics
Site definitions are located in the following folder on the SharePoint server:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\14\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates
Each site definition has its own sub directory under this folder.
Inside each site...
Update 11-22-2009: See this blog post if you would like to see how to do this in SharePoint 2010.
The new version WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007) of SharePoint brings some changes to the way Site Definitions are created and deployed to a SharePoint server. Additionally, the way Site Definitions are now architected has changed with the advent of Features. Although FrontPage 2003 has been significantly enhanced to become the Office SharePoint Designer, Features allow for more flexible deployments of functionality within SharePoint, and Master Pages allow us to change the look and feel of many sites inside SharePoint with a...
Update 11-22-2009: See this blog post for the SharePoint 2010 version of this information.
MOSS 2007 ships with many predefined Templates you may use to create Site Collections and sub sites. Sometimes the out of the box site Templates will meet the needs of your project. Other times, the out of the box site Templates may need to be enhanced.
Knowing which site Template has the functionality you need to deploy, or use as a baseline for a custom Site Definition, is one of the key decisions you make when architecting a SharePoint deployment. This being said, it is important to...