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

7.1. Page Rendering Process Overview

Before jumping into master pages and page layouts, developers should understand how pages are constructed within a Publishing site, as it is a bit different from a typical SharePoint site. All content pages within a Publishing site are stored within a special list called Pages. This is the reason why the URL of Publishing sites always has /Pages near the end, just before the name of the requested page or file.

When a request is received for a URL within a Publishing site, SharePoint immediately goes to the list item of the requested Pages list. This list item contains some critical information related to the construction of the page:

• Page Layout — URL of the page layout associated with this page.

• Associated Content Type — Content type that defines the schema and business rules for a type of page.

• Name — URL name of the page requested (i.e., the default for the default.aspx requested page).

• Metadata — Data such as the page title, the description, the scheduling configuration, as well as contact information for the owner of the page.

• Content Fields — One or more fields containing content to be displayed on the page.

SharePoint first retrieves the URL of the page layout from the list item in the Pages list. Page layouts inherit from a specific class, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingLayoutPage, that sets the master page for the request. Once SharePoint has retrieved both the page layout and the master page, the two are merged together. Finally, ...