Creating Page Layouts using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio Becky Bertram MVP SharePoint Server, MCSD, MCAD

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 pre- determined 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.

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. Handles security easily.

Big push by Microsoft this year MS trying to raise awareness that SharePoint is more than collaboration. They’ll be trying to advertise successful SharePoint WCM sites. Examples of SP2007 and SP2010 public WCM sites: Ferrari Kroger Hawaiian Air Library of Congress Energizer

What’s New in SP 2010 WCM Better SharePoint Designer views for Site Columns, Content Types, Master Pages, and Page Layouts New process for creating pages Ribbon instead of Page Editing Toolbar Enterprise Wiki pages Streaming video (sort of) Managed Metadata Service (i.e. global Content Types) Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy Application pages can use your customized Master Page Modified workflow

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, a Site Collection Documents Library, and the Reusable Content list/

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 but will simply show up as

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 Name CSR Title CSR Bio CSR Photo CSR 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 File (ASPX page presentation of content) Associated Content Type Page Layout

Master Page Gallery

Page Layouts and Site Templates Page

Demo Creating a Publishing Page using SharePoint Designer

Demo Creating a Publishing Page using Visual Studio

SharePoint Six-in-One Published by Wrox Coming out February 2011 Chapter 9 covers SharePoint Publishing Sites