Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

5.1. Elements of a Publishing Site

The first step in the process of creating a minimal Publishing site definition is to look at what is included out-of-the-box (OOTB) with the Publishing framework in MOSS. When a new site collection is created based on the Publishing Portal template, the default site definition creates the content shown in Figure 5-1. Some of this content is critical to the operation of the Publishing sites within the collection, while other content is extraneous and can be removed. The critical parts are described in the following sections.

Figure 5-1. Figure 5-1

5.1.1. The Pages Library

Every Publishing site needs a document library to store the actual pages that are created in the site. This library is always called Pages so that it can be referenced easily from hyperlinks and other parts of the portal. When the site is first created, the Pages library contains a single entry named default.aspx, which defines the home page of the Publishing site. This page in turn references a page layout. As new pages are added to the site, they are created as items in the Pages document library.

5.1.2. Styles and Images

Many of the CSS style sheets, XSLT style sheets, images, and other files are specific to the default Publishing site definition and the sample content it includes. Of the 63 items in the default Style Library, only the core styles (about three files) are ...