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

6.3. Role of Site Columns and Content Types in Publishing Sites

While the title of this section might imply that site columns and content types have a special role or are used in some special way in Publishing sites (compared to standard WSS 3.0 sites), that is not the case. It is actually how content types are leveraged within a Publishing site — specifically, content pages — that warrants a bit of explanation.

When a content owner creates a new page, one of the first things selected is the page layout (see Figure 6-3). Selecting a page layout implicitly selects a content type as well: the content type the page layout is associated with. In this pairing, the content type is defining the schema, or the data elements, comprising the particular type of page. These data elements, or fields, are defined in the content type using site columns. The page layout serves the role of defining the rendering (when combined with the site's selected master page).

Figure 6-3. Figure 6-3

With content types defining the schema of the page, not only can developers specify the site columns (also known as data elements) for a type of a page, everything else content types bring to the table can also be leveraged. For instance, special workflows or event receivers can be associated with types of content, not just the list the content resides within. This capability provides developers with the most ...