SharePoint 4 Developers

Hi Folks, how´re you doing?

As per talked before, in this post message I am going to start the “SharePoint Lessons” series. These lessons will have a different approach, focused on SharePoint Solution developments (WSS 3.0/ MOSS 2007).

Maybe you are questioning yourself, how many lessons will these series be compound of? I can declare that more than 10 lessons… I have enough material to be presented.

This initial lesson is called Core SharePoint Features. The essential features will be presented in this first lesson. They are: Site collections and sites, lists, columns, views and web parts.

Being presented at this moment, this lesson needs to be exposed, because the next lessons will have a dependency on this one.

After reading this post message, if you have any doubt, I ask you to leave your comment. This way we can share more information about this subject and everybody can participate.

Well, let´s go.

Site Collections and Sites

Sites are organized hierarchically within SharePoint (WSS and MOSS), sort of like the folders in a conventional filesystem. Only instead of drives, folders, and subfolders, SharePoint uses web applications, site collections, and sites.

The figure below shows the basic structure of how sites are organized:

Figure 1 – Hierarchical structure of sites

This structure goes from the servers of a farm (collection of one or more SharePoint servers) to the subsites.

Site Collections operate as site containers. As per the Figure 1, site collections contain a site in their roots, where /sites/HR is the top-level site.

Tip: If your company has many departments, you should create for each department a site collection. This way all of sites created underneath their respective site collections will have the same security context (administrative permission-levels), in other words, every department can manage its on sites within this security context.

Just complementing this tip, in the Figure 2 we can see the default Managed Paths when creating site collections. E.g: sites and (root).

Figure 2 – Managed Paths

You can create your own Managed Paths at the moment that you are creating a site collection. Figure 3 displays a shortcut to define Managed Paths.

Figure 3 – Site Collection creation page

Be aware of the types of Managed Paths: Wildcard inclusion and Explicit inclusion.
The main difference between each one is that an Explicit inclusion just can be utilized to create a site collection specified in its path, as per Figure 4. Whereas the Wildcard inclusion can be utilized many times to create site collections subordinated to the path, as per Figure 5.

Figure 4 – Explicit inclusion

Figure 5 – Wildcard inclusion

Figures speak louder than words, can you see the difference?

Coming back to the main subject, for those who like to see to believe, there is a link of code samples to retrieve Site Collections e Sites:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms462161.aspx

In the link above you can find many samples just to test inside the SharePoint environment. In case you want to test them in a Console Application, check this out:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms438026.aspx

Warning: A SPSite represents a site collection and a SPWeb represents a site.

Another option to check sites collections is available through the Application Management, as per Figure 6.

Figure 6 – Application Management page contains a site collections list

Throughout this post message, some definitions concerning sites and sites collections were explained. These are basic concepts that you need to understand to structure your web site.

This lesson is not finished yet, in the next post message I will explain about lists, columns, views and web parts.

Cheers,

Marcel Medina

Click here to read the same content in Portuguese.