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

6.5. Summary

This chapter has covered the core components within any SharePoint site: site columns, content types, and lists. Lists are the lowest-level storage construct within any SharePoint site, just as tables are in databases. Lists are primarily composed of columns but they can have additional characteristics such as custom workflows, event receivers, configurable versioning schemes, and policies. One of the challenges associated with lists in WSS 2.0 was that lists typically could only contain one type of data. This is because the schema of a list was not very flexible or portable. To address this, Microsoft introduced content types in WSS 3.0, which separate the schema of a type of information from the list. This enables administrators and developers to define a type of data, including some business rules and a process wrapped around it, that can then be associated with multiple lists.

All three of these different site elements (site columns, content types, and lists) can be created in various ways, such as using the SharePoint browser interface, using custom code, and using Features. In all three instances, however, Features provide the most code reuse and portability to implement the site elements in different environments.