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

11.3. MOSS 2007 Publishing Web Parts

The beginning of the chapter mentioned that Microsoft included three Publishing-specific Web Parts in MOSS 2007. These three Web Parts, Summary Links, Table of Contents, and Content Query are available only within sites that have the Publishing Features activated because they have a dependency on some XSL files provisioned in the activation of these Features. Two of these Web Parts are primarily used for rolling up links to content — to promote content reuse rather than content duplication. The other, Summary Links, is used primarily to add some ad hoc links to a page on a site. The following sections discuss and demonstrate each of these in more detail.

All three Web Parts can have the rendering styles customized beyond what is available out of the box. The most extensible and powerful of the three, the Content Query Web Part, provides some very advanced customization techniques that can eliminate most custom-built content rollup Web Parts that developers are building today. While this chapter only covers in detail some advanced customization techniques with the Content Query Web Part, the techniques demonstrated can be applied to all three, including the rendering style customization options.

All three Web Parts work the same way under the hood. Depending on the Web Part, it retrieves the links that should be shown as an XML structure. The Summary Links Web Part retrieves the links stored within the Web Part, whereas the other two (Table ...