If Web Content Management is the management of web site content, the SharePoint publishing infrastructure
is the implementation of such WCM functionality. At the very basic
level, the publishing infrastructure consists of a series of features
and site templates.
A Publishing Site
Before delving into the specific publishing
features of SharePoint 2013, you will create a new publishing site
collection, so that you may see the various features and functionality
available as part of this site definition. Whether you plan to host a
public-facing web site, an extranet, intranet (with WCM capabilities),
or some other WCM-based site, you will likely want to start with the
Publishing Site template (there are others, but the Publishing Site is
most common).
- Open Central Administration.
- Click the link to create site collections.
- Choose the hosting web application.
- Provide a title, description, and URL.
- Under the template selection section, click the Publishing tab.
- Choose the Publishing Portal.
- Provide the primary and secondary administrators.
- Choose the quota profile.
- Click the OK button to create.
- Once SharePoint completes creation of the new site collection,
navigate to the new site, which should look something like that in Figure 1.
The home page shown in Figure 1
provides some helpful links to get you started with the configuration
of your new publishing site. All of these links point to admin pages,
which you may also access through the site collection settings page.
However, having a series of links in one place is helpful to more
quickly configure the publishing site. I will now examine them in more
detail.
Table 1 lists the jump links on the publishing home page, as shown in Figure 1.
Configuring a publishing site is typically a two-team operation,
consisting of the administration team and the designer team.
Administrators follow the links on the left side of the page, and
designers the links on the right side. The great thing about SharePoint
is that each team may work in parallel, without relying on the other to
complete its work. This is an important capability of SharePoint
publishing sites: content owners and site administrators need not
concern themselves with the visual design of the publishing site, and
the designers need not concern themselves with the content of the site.
This principle is one of the major pillars of a Web Content Management
system: content people manage content, and design people manage look
and feel.
Table 1. Jump Links on the Publishing Site Home Page
| Set up site permissions |
Administration |
Link to the site permissions page; assign site permissions to
groups; SharePoint has a default set of permissions configured for the
root site and any subsites inheriting the permissions; administrators
may enable anonymous access for public-facing web sites |
| Make your site multilingual |
Administration |
Create variation labels for set up of site structure variants for each content language supported |
| Define content types |
Administration |
Link to the site content type gallery; define content types, which
inherit from publishing content types (such as Page) to facilitate
granular content storage |
| Configure navigation |
Administration |
Link to the navigation settings for the site; configure strategy
for top navigation bar and quick launch navigation, as well as
taxonomy-based navigation |
| Create and configure site content |
Administration |
Link to the view site content page; look to the pages document library to host publishing pages for the site |
| Customize your search center |
Administration |
Link to configure search settings; define a search center (either
as a subsite or a separate site collection)—it is good practice to
centralize search results with a search center |
| Import a design package |
Designer |
New capability in SharePoint 2013: import a design package for look and feel of the site |
| Configure image renditions |
Designer |
Link to the image renditions settings page; configure different image renditions for renditions (display) of image sizes |
| Design your site |
|
New in SharePoint 2013: link to the new Design Manager pages |
| Choose availability of site templates |
|
Link to the site templates and page layout settings; configure
availability of page layouts and site templates for users creating
subsites in the publishing site hierarchy |
Table 1
includes a description of each link and the capability provided at each
link destination.
