Why would you want to use Publishing Sites?
Guest Author: Asif Rehmani – SharePoint Server MVP, MCT
SharePoint eLearning
The most popular type of site template used in most SharePoint 2007 deployments is the Team Site template. The Team Site template provides a great platform to facilitate collaboration among peers in a team or department. However, there is another type of site template which is best utilized in large Intranet and Internet sites. In both of these scenarios, you will want only a few people to control the content that’s being published. On the other hand, there is usually hundreds if not thousands of people who will be reading this content. For this scenario, a Publishing Site template is best utilized.
A publishing site is a feature of SharePoint Server Standard or above. This concept was integrated into SharePoint Server when Content Management Server (no longer a product by itself) was rolled into SharePoint in the 2007 release. A publishing site has publishing pages which contain field controls in addition to web part zones and web parts. These pages reside in a very special library called Pages. The pages in the Pages library all derive from pre-defined page layouts which tell the page how to position its content on the page. For example, a page layout can have a placeholder on the top right of the page to hold a picture while another page layout can have a picture placeholder at the top left of the page, but the same content regions as the other page layouts.
Watch this video to see the differences being pointed out in a Team Site and a Publishing Site: Publishing Sites vs Team Sites.
Guest Author: Asif Rehmani – SharePoint Server MVP, MCT
SharePoint eLearning
Asif has over 10 years of training and consulting experience in the IT industry. He has been training and consulting on primarily SharePoint technologies for over 4 years. He is a SharePoint Server MVP and MCT.
Asif is the co-author of the book “Professional SharePoint Designer 2007“ by Wrox publications. He has also been a speaker on SharePoint topics at several conferences over the years including Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference, SharePoint Connections, Advisor Live, and Information Workers Conference.
Asif runs a SharePoint eLearning website (http://www.sharepoint-elearning.com) which provides dozens of SharePoint Video Tutorials. He was the co-founder and is currently one of the active leaders of the Chicago SharePoint User Group.
I’ve always been baffled by Publishing Sites, and videos like this that ‘teach’ you how to put random stuff on a page without any cohesion or purpose aren’t very good advertisements for them.
FWIW the OOTB Master pages are just different shades of ugly.
I created a topic in forums earlier this week as I discovered that users I had granted Contribute permissions to appear to have same capabilities as those with Design permission, as far as a Publishing site is concerned. Cory walked me through some troubleshooting which led to the Pages library being responsible. Contribute permissions are inherited to library and users can modify the existing page (or create a new page). Other than breaking permissions on the library (more than a few sites exist) is there other options or how do you cope with this?
What changes with 2010 or does this behavior remain?