SharePoint Site Definitions
I'm finally plunging headfirst into the world of creating a custom SPS Site Definition from scratch (well, based on the Team Site definition anyway). Two things I've discovered right off the mark:
- There is no UI to help you out here. I'm a GUI freak, but am comfortable doing the nitty gritty when necessary. Doing the dirty work, however, takes TIME. And customizing ONET.XML and all of the SCHEMA.XML files is a fair chunk of work. We all don't have enough time these days, so tools that makes this easier are a plus. Are there any out there that I may be missing? I saw on a blog somewhere that someone has written a utility to make site definition files out of Front Page 2003 Web Packages, but I don't know if it is freely available yet.
- Site/Library/List settings management is click-click-click-click-click. In this case, I'm referring to the lack of a roll-up view of settings for SPS entities that have been deployed. For instance, I'd like to see a list of all Lists in a Site, and view the configured settings (content approval, document versioning, template file, etc.) at a glance in a grid. You'd think you can do something like this with the stsadm.exe tool - nope. I'd like to go even further, and list all the fields and views for each List, with properties for both. Am I missing something? Is there a tool to do this? If not, I'd love to create one, but I doubt I have the time.