Sharepoint 2010 : Putting Your Site on the Web - Web Content Management (part 2) - Web Publishing 101

Web Publishing 101: Publishing Sites

There are different kinds of site templates within SharePoint (Collaboration, Meeting, Enterprise, Publishing, Custom). The publishing site templates provide additional features that enable business users to create and manage Web content on a page (or create brand new Web pages). For some people, this may sound a lot like a wiki site. Isn’t a wiki site also an easy way to create new Web pages and update existing Web pages? Yes. The main difference is that wikis are a geared toward sharing ideas within a community. Wikis provide Web pages that can be quickly edited to record information and then linked together through keywords, but they are far less powerful than the full-fledged WCM pages. For example, take a look at www.xbox.com. This is not a wiki—it is a highly stylized Web site with a number of controls to keep it branded properly. In publishing sites, contributors can work on draft versions of pages and publish them to make them visible to readers. Publishing sites also include document and image libraries for storing Web publishing assets such as site pages and images.

Take a look at a SharePoint 2010 publishing site. Publishing site templates are available in the Content & Data tab (see Figure 4). When you’ve created a publishing site, SharePoint provides a number of new menu options.

Figure 4. The Publishing site template provides page layouts that contain field controls so that business users can add content without affecting the design of the page

Interestingly, the Web publishing features are actually provided by a SharePoint Feature. This means that you can add publishing features to any SharePoint site. First, you must turn on the Publishing feature in the Site Collection. Try the following: Create a regular SharePoint team site. Notice how you get the standard Site Actions options as depicted in Figure 5. Next, go to Site Settings. Under Site Administration, select Site Features. The Publishing feature is what helps the SharePoint site to support Web publishing features. Enable this feature by clicking Activate (see Figure 6). Go back to your site; it will look the same. But if you look more closely, you’ll notice some key changes. For example, the Site Actions menu has a number of additional options related to publishing, like Create Page (see Figure 7).

Figure 5. Site Settings is available by clicking the Site Actions content menu

Figure 6. The Publishing site feature can be activated in Site Settings

Figure 7. After enabling the Publishing feature within a site, users with appropriate permissions will see options to create and manage Web pages

Although the Publishing Feature can be used with any SharePoint site, you’ll probably plan to use it more to create Internet-facing sites. The Internet Presence template that ships with SharePoint is a good example—it uses a set of master pages, layouts, and styles. However, your layout and styles will likely need to be very different from the example template. Hence, when creating your Internet site, you’ll probably want to start with a blank slate and build from there. This is an important consideration when planning an Internet-facing site.