Creating Page Layouts using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio Becky Bertram MCSD, MCAD MCTS WSS Development MCTS MOSS Development www.beckybertram.com
What is Web Content Management? According to Wikipedia: A Web content management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions. Usually the software provides authoring (and other) tools designed to allow users with little or no knowledge of programming languages or markup languages to create and manage content with relative ease of use.
What are the main features of a WCM solution? Provides a system of maintaining large amounts of content (text), images, and associated digital assets (such as documents, etc.) to be delivered through the medium of the Web. Provides a user interface that allows non-technical users to maintain and publish content, using predetermined templates. Usually involves a publishing process, whereby content can be approved before it gets published on the site. Often includes an ability for web content to be published at a certain time, and conversely removed from the site at a particular time.
A History of MOSS 2007 s WCM Features Microsoft purchased a company called ncompass in 2001, and rebranded its product Microsoft Content Management Server. Microsoft also released SharePoint Portal Server in 2001, as a webbased document management system and digital dashboard. Microsoft also released a free add-on to Office 2000, called SharePoint Team Services, as a web-based collaboration tool. In 2003, Microsoft renamed STS to Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (WSS), and merged it with SharePoint Portal Server 2003. In 2004, the SPS and CMS teams joined together. In 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server was released, which including Web Content Management tools and the WCM infrastructure. Taken from the following blog entry: http://www.joiningdots.net/blog/2006/08/sharepoint-history.html
Why use MOSS for WCM? Built on ASP.NET 2.0 and WWF. SharePoint has tools available for all kinds of users, whether they re business users who are modifying Publishing sites using SharePoint Designer, or Visual Studio developers who are creating custom solutions. Highly scalable. Comes with a content deployment mechanism for deploying web content between server environments.
The SharePoint Publishing Infrastructure To use the Web Content Management Features, you need to activate the Publishing Infrastructure Feature for a Site Collection. Among other things, this will provision custom Master Pages, the Page Layouts infrastructure, a Site Collection Images Library, and a Site Collection Documents Library.
Publishing Infrastructure at the Web Level Each SharePoint web must also have the Publishing Feature activated at the Web level as well. Activating this Feature provisions a Pages library, where all the web pages for that Web will reside. In addition, an Images library will be provisioned for that Web as well. When the Publishing feature is activated, Lists and Libraries will no longer have a URL of http://myurl/lists/mylist, but will simply show up as http://myurl/mylist.
Site Columns and Content Types A Site Column, in its most generic sense, is a description of information. Is it text, a number, a list of choices? The column s title also describes it. Is it a contact s name, a birthday, an employee number or what? A Content Type, in its most generic sense, is a collection of these smaller definitions a collection of columns. For instance, a Business Contact could have a Name column, an Address Column, and a Customer ID column. A Sweepstakes Winner could also have a Name and an Address, but they would have a Winning Number field, and no Contact ID. Because the kind of information is the same as the Business Contact, it could share the same site columns, but the Content Type is defining a different kind of entity than the Business Contact.
Customer Service Representative Content Type CSR CSR Name CSR Title CSR Bio CSR Photo Page
Typical SharePoint List View
Better Visual Presentation
Page Layouts The term for a Publishing Page Template is a Page Layout. A Publishing Page Layout is the visual representation of an underlying SharePoint list item. A Page Layout can allow content owners to edit content in a way that mirrors how the content will appear on the web site.
Editing a Publishing Page
Page Layout Content Type Page Layout File (ASPX page presentation of content) Associated Content Type
Master Page Gallery
Demo Creating a Publishing Page using SharePoint Designer
Demo Creating a Publishing Page using Visual Studio