Announcing SharePoint Site Configurator Feature on CodePlex

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It is an pleasure to announce the second of our two new SharePoint projects on Codeplex.com:

Project Description
SharePoint Site Configurator Feature is a small framework for taking care of all configurations, settings and featurestapling you need for transforming a standard blank site definition into your own full blown site, without the hassle of creating a complex custom site definition.

Feature description
Several bloggers have lately argued that you should avoid creating site definitions when it can be avoided, and instead do the configuration through features that are stapled to "empty" site definitions. The Site Configurator feature is a feature that lets you define the most common configurations in a "shadow" site definition.
Staple this feature to a copy of a blank site definition. Enter the settings and your own features in the settings file.

Background
The goal with the SharePoint Site Configurator Feature is to minimize the need to create custom site definitions in SharePoint development projects.
Main reasons for moving away from custom site definitions are:

  • No need for creating and maintaining large and complex custom onet.xml-files
  • Minimize effort in a future upgrade scenario, no need for creating difficult mapping files and performing tedious tests and retests to get good results
  • Better control of the site creation process, e.g. activate features in a controllable order
  • Make testing/debugging of site creation a whole lot easier!

Details
The SharePoint Site Configurator Feature consists of these elements:

  1. Microsoft.MCS.FeatureStapler: The stapler Feature binding the staplee to an OOB blank site definition
  2. Microsoft.MCS.SiteConfigurator: The staplee Feature which is the SiteConfigurator
    1. SiteConfiguration.xml: The xml-file holding the settings for the site(s)

In addition these files might also need to be added/modified

  1. /12/Template/<localeid>/XML/webtemp<your>.xml: The site with the stapler as it appears in the "Create site"-dialog
  2. /12/Template/SiteTemplates/<the site definition that has the stapler, a copy of a blank site definition>

SharePoint Site Configurator Feature example solution

SiteConfigurator_solution_thumb 

 

Read on at the Codeplex site: https://www.codeplex.com/spsiteconfigurator