EXCAVATING THE SITE in Font

Generating ECC200 in Font EXCAVATING THE SITE

OK, now it is time to investigate the content of the Project element. This is where the really good stuff lives.

The NavBars section contains, well, the nav bars. What is a nav bar you ask. Good question. Nav bars are the main navigational elements of a SharePoint site. You should be familiar with the top nav bar, which is the navigational bar over the main content area of a Team Site that holds links to the subsites of our site collection. It is marked 1 in Figure 4-1. However, there are plenty of other nav bars as well. In the STS folder s onet.xml file, you ll find six nav bars, which consist of the top nav bar and a nav bar for each of the headings in the QuickLaunch menu. When you add a new library, list, discussion board, or site to your site, SharePoint optionally adds a link to the respective nav bar. You can also add your own links using either declarative syntax or code. You can even modify the nav bars in real time or create an entirely new nav bar if you are so inclined. Nav bars are cool when you get the hang of them. You have great control over their appearance and behavior, and you can use both the built-in nav bar and your own nav bar to customize and create new navigational options. You will explore modifying the NavBars section in more detail in 15.

If you open the ListTemplates section, you will find nothing How strange that there are no list templates defined for your site, especially since you know that there must be list templates defined somewhere. The answer to this mystery is that the list templates that are available for the Team Site are defined in features, not in the site definition. So, what is a list template Well, as the name implies, it is a template for new lists, defining the fields, views, settings, and forms that a new list should contain. When list templates are defined for a site, either through the site definition or through features, the list template appears on the Create page of SharePoint. I will cover lists and list templates in much more detail in 7.

The DocumentTemplates section defined in the onet.xml file contains the list of templates available for a new library. You may have noticed that when you create a new document library you are given an option to attach a default document template. The list from which you choose is composed of the DocumentTemplate elements of the site definition. Figure 4-7 shows the default document templates for the English Team Site definition.

Figure 4-7. Default document templates Why is this cool Well, it allows you to create a set of templates customized to your solution; for example, you can have Microsoft Word template documents with your company s letterhead or Microsoft PowerPoint presentation templates that follow a predetermined format, or you can precreate web pages with a custom layout that you use for new pages. You are not limited by the Microsoft Office suite of document templates either you can add document templates from any application. Note that if you add a new document template type, for instance a PDF file, you may want to add a document icon so that the new document will not display an unknown document type icon. To do so, go to the [12]\TEMPLATE\XML folder, and open the docicon.xml file. Here, add an entry under the ByExtension section as such: <Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdficon.gif""/> Exchange the Key and Value values shown here with your specific information. Next, add the .gif file of your document template type to the [12]\TEMPLATE\IMAGES folder.