Exporting A SharePoint Site Into A Feature: Part 5 – Wrap Up

Part 1 – The Tools
Part 2 – Exporting the Site
Part 3 – Exporting the Lists
Part 4 – Exporting the Site Columns and Content Types
Part 5 – Wrap Up Before I begin with the wrap up portion of this post, I want to make a correction to this series. I was doing a bit of research today (quick comparisons, Joel Oleson’s take, deeper look at site definitions) on site templates, features, and site definitions and it struck me that the title of this series (Exporting a SharePoint Site into a Feature) isn’t quite accurate. In reality, what I have been doing with my provided steps is creating a base site definition (simple few pages with web parts associated) and then stapled a number of features to the site definition. There has been quite a bit of debate (see Joel Oleson’s post above) on which site provisioning method to use, each having it’s own pros and cons. I’m not trying to tell you to choose one over the other, but do your research when deciding and find the method that best suits your (or your company’s) needs. I hope this clears up some confusion I may have caused with the title.With that let’s continue on and walk through some of the steps for deployment and little quirks I’ve noticed. For deployment, I use WSPBuilder to build and deploy my WSP files to the development farm. What this ends up doing is copy my site definition files into a 12 Hive folder and deploy my features to the farm. Site definitions stored in the 12 Hive (compared to stored in the database when customized through the UI or site templates) gives a performance gain. On the downside site definitions are not (easily) updateable once deployed. I say that because you technically can update your site definition, but it requires deleting and recreating your site if it has been provisioned anywhere. With my current project we are only deploying one instance of each site definition to each environment and have backup software to facilitate easy migration of data from the old to new instance. Hopefully your site definition remains fairly static and you only add functionality or modifications through new or updated features (which can be easily upgraded.)Once you have your WSP deployed, you can provision an instance of your site definition by creating a new site (or site collection) from your site settings page (or central admin for site collection.) In your site definition onet.xml file, any features that you have placed in the <SiteFeatures> or <WebFeatures> elements will be “stapled” or automatically added and activated upon provisioning. Below is a reduced list, but I have features to add web parts, lists, and content types among other things.
One thing to note about my features. The feature “Messaging Security Groups” is commented out. The reason for that is that that feature creates a number of SharePoint groups (composers, approvers, etc) and assigns them permissions to the site being created. However, the owner of these groups happens to be the Site Owners group. Because I am not inheriting security from the parent site, new Site Owner, Member, and Reader groups are created. This is an issue because those new groups are created after my features have been stapled. This means that I must manually activate this feature after the site provisions process has occurred. If anyone knows a good way around this please let me know.

A few other things I’ve noticed during development. When using the methods described in this series to export an instance of this site definition you will get some duplicate entries in the site definition files, particularly when it comes to web parts assigned to pages in the onet.xml. I would recommend updating the original site definition (by hand or copying over only the changes from a new export) as a workaround. Also, I have a few web parts that provide and consume connections to each other on various pages. I haven’t found an easy way to configure those connections in code. Some suggestions were found, but I was unable to get them working. Instead I manually assign the connections once the page has been provisioned. Again if any know of a way around that please let me know.

And so I draw to a close this series. Thanks for reading along. Hopefully it gives you some pointers and insight into creating, exporting, and maintaining a site definition and associated features. Drop me a comment if you have any questions, suggestions, or input.

– Frog Out