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

Chapter 5. Minimal Publishing Site Definition

Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 includes a Publishing Portal site definition that can be used to create new Publishing site collections. It includes all of the elements required by the MOSS Web Content Management (WCM) architecture, which consists of content types, master pages, page layouts, style sheets, images, and Web Parts, which together are used to perform various publishing tasks. It also includes a document library for holding the published pages, some default field controls, and sample content. Creating a new Publishing site typically begins by creating a new Publishing site collection based on the Publishing Portal site definition, and then carefully removing the parts not needed. This can be a tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming process.

At first glance, it is not obvious which parts are extraneous and which parts are critical to the underlying WCM framework. If the wrong file is deleted, either it has to be replaced or the process has to start from scratch by creating the site collection again. What is needed is a minimal site definition that can be used as a starting point to create new Publishing site collections. This template would contain all the essential elements, excluding the extraneous sample content. That is what this chapter is all about.

What are the available options for creating a minimal Publishing site definition? One approach might be to create a new Publishing Portal site, remove the parts ...