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

Chapter 6. Site Columns, Content Types, and Lists

At the core, all content in a SharePoint site is stored in lists. This includes things such as master pages, images, style sheets, XSL styles, and content pages; even page layouts (in the case of Publishing sites) are stored in SharePoint lists. Similar to tables in a database, lists are composed of columns, or fields.

One of the challenges with Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 2.0 with respect to lists was that the list templates were not very dynamic. In addition, many aspects of lists were not reusable. Such is the case when defining types of data within a list as well as the columns in lists. Microsoft addressed these issues by introducing a few new concepts. First, list columns can be defined as site columns, or templates, that can be used across multiple lists. Second, the type of data can be abstracted from a list into a new entity called a content type. Content types can then be added to a list either through the definition of the list or through the browser interface, by a site administrator. Lists can even contain multiple content types facilitating the storage of heterogeneous types of data within a single list. Finally, list templates can now be associated with sites not only at the point of site creation, but also at any time thereafter thanks to the addition of Features.

This chapter covers each of these three site elements in depth, including a detailed look at the different options available to administrators and ...