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

5.3. The Challenge with the Publishing Portal Site Definition

What is wrong with this site definition and the associated Features? One very common use for Publishing sites is an Internet-facing content-centric site. These Internet-facing sites usually have their own look and feel, which is customized quite a bit from the stock SharePoint design. To implement this custom branding, developers have to first create the site collection using the Publishing Portal template and then they usually remove all the branding files that were added as part of this template. This includes things such as various images, style sheets, and master pages.

It would be much easier to create a new SharePoint site with the entire Publishing infrastructure and no branding. This is the goal of the Minimal Publishing Portal site definition. How is it different from the stock Publishing Portal site definition? Most everything can be traced back to the PublishingLayouts Feature, which is responsible for adding most of the stock branding. Unfortunately, it is not terribly easy or straightforward because, as previously shown in Figure 5-3, the PublishingLayouts Feature is activated by another Feature, which is activated by yet another Feature, which is activated by the site definition. This means a new Feature is needed that replaces some of these other Features. In addition, it will add the minimal branding required to have a working site collection.