There are various ways that you can customise a SharePoint site, some easier than others. I think that before you take the first steps to customising your environment, you need to consider what your final deliverable is going to be. There seems to be some disagreement on whether site definitions or Features is the way to go. I don’t profess to know the answer to that one but it does seem to depend on what you are trying to do.
For this post I will look at cloning an existing site definition, the Team Site. We won’t be modifying the definition at this time (we’ll save that for a future post). Your cloned site definition will appear as a new entry on the Collaboration tab.
First things first…
Cloning the “Team Site” site definition
The first thing we need to know is where the site definitions are actually stored. To confuse things, Microsoft called the directory SiteTemplates and you can find it here;
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates
Within the SiteTemplates directory are multiple sub-directories. Which ones you see will depend on whether you have Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS3.0) or Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) installed. The image below shows the MOSS installed site definitions
Figure 1 – The SiteTemplates Directory
The next thing you will notice is that there isn’t a directory called “Team Site”. The definition is held within the STS directory, so this is the first place we need to look. The directory structure for STS is as follows;
Figure 2 – The STS Directory
Within the xml directory is a file called ONET.XML. We’ll come back to ONET.XML later on.
So, the first thing we need to do is take a copy of the STS directory and then rename the copy. In this example I have called my new site definition CUSTOMSTS. We will need this name later on.
Figure 3 – The CUSTOMSTS Directory
You should now see your CUSTOMSTS directory within SiteTemplates. Leave this as it is for the time being.
The next step is to make sure that our custom site definition appears in the Collaboration tab on the site creation page. There are a series of XML pages that tell SharePoint what site definition to display and on what tab. For these files we need to look at another directory, which you can find here;
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML
Within the 1033\XML directory are several XML files, as shown below
Figure 4 – The 1033\XML Directory
The keen-eyed among you may spot a pattern in the naming convention used here. The majority of the files begin with WEBTEMP. The second part of the file name will correspond to the name of one of the sub-directories within SiteTemplates, so;
WEBTEMPSPS.XML --> SiteTemplates\SPS
WEBTEMPOSRV.XML --> SiteTemplates\OSRV
WEBTEMPOFFILE.XML --> SiteTemplates\OFFILE
There are a couple of XML files here that you do not need to worry about at this time;
DEADWEB.XML
RGNLSTNG.XML
These XML files are used for administrative purposes and shouldn’t be touched.
So, where is WEBTEMPSTS.XML? Good question! For some reason, Microsoft decided to bundle multiple site configurations together into WEBTEMP.XML and WEBTEMPSPS.XML.
The following table provides a bit more detail on what is where.
XML File SiteTemplates Directory Site Creation Page Tab Template Name # Configuration ID Tab ID Hidden WEBTEMP.XML Global template GLOBAL 0 Yes WEBTEMP.XML \STS Team Site STS#0 Collaboration 1 No WEBTEMP.XML \STS Blank Site STS#1 Collaboration 1 No WEBTEMP.XML \STS Document Workspace STS#2 Collaboration 1 No WEBTEMP.XML \CENTRALADMIN Central Admin Site CENTRALADMIN 3 Yes WEBTEMP.XML \MPS Basic Meeting Workspace MPS#0 Meetings 2 No WEBTEMP.XML \MPS Blank Meeting Workspace MPS#1 Meetings 2 No WEBTEMP.XML \MPS Decision Meeting Workspace MPS#2 Meetings 2 No WEBTEMP.XML \MPS Social Meeting Workspace MPS#3 Meetings 2 No WEBTEMP.XML \MPS Multipage Meeting Workspace MPS#4 Meetings 2 No WEBTEMP.XML \Wiki Wiki WIKI Collaboration 4 No WEBTEMP.XML \Blog Blog BLOG Collaboration 9 No WEBTEMPBDR.EN-US.XML \BDR Document Centre BDR Enterprise 7 No WEBTEMPOFFILE.XML \OFFILE Records Centre OFFILE#0 Enterprise 14483 Yes WEBTEMPOFFILE.XML \OFFILE Records Centre OFFILE#1 Enterprise 14483 No WEBTEMPOSRV.XML \OSRV Shared Services Administration Site OSRV#0 40 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPS SharePoint Portal Server Site SPS#0 20 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSPERS SharePoint Portal Server Personal Space SPSPERS#0 21 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSMSITE Personalisation Site SPSMSITE#0 Enterprise 22 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSTOC Contents Area Template SPSTOC#0 30 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSTOPIC Topic Area Template SPSTOPIC#0 31 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSNEWS News Site SPSNEWS#0 32 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \PUBLISHING Publishing Site CMSPUBLISHING#0 Publishing 39 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML \BLANKINTERNET Publishing Site BLANKINTERNET#0 Publishing 53 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \BLANKINTERNET Press Release Site BLANKINTERNET#1 Publishing 53 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \BLANKINTERNET Publishing Site with Workflow BLANKINTERNET#2 Publishing 53 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML Minimal MINIMAL#0 Minimal 99 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSNHOME News Site SPSNHOME#0 Publishing 33 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSSITES Site Directory SPSSITES#0 Enterprise 34 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML Community Area Template SPSCOMMU#0 36 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSREPORTCENTER Report Centre SPSREPORTCENTRE#0 Enterprise 38 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML Collaboration Portal SPSPORTAL#0 Publishing 47 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SRCHCEN Search Centre with Tabs SRCHCEN#0 Enterprise 50 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML \PROFILES Profiles PROFILES#0 51 Yes WEBTEMPSPS.XML Publishing Portal BLANKINTERNETCONTAINER#0 Publishing 52 No WEBTEMPSPS.XML \SPSMSITEHOST My Site Host SPSMSITEHOST#0 Enterprise 54 No WEBTEMPSRCH.XML \SRCHCENTERLITE Search Centre SRCHCENTERLITE#0 Enterprise 90 No
As you can see, there are quite a few entries that the user doesn’t actually see.
Following on with the WEBTEMP naming convention, we need to copy WEBTEMP.XML and rename it to WEBTEMPCUSTOMSTS.XML. Open the new file and remove everything except the following code;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<!-- _lcid="1033" _version="12.0.4518" _dal="1" -->
<!-- _LocalBinding -->
<Templates xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint">
<Template Name="CUSTOMSTS" ID="1">
<Configuration ID="0" Title="My Team Site" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/stsprev.png"
Description="My Team Site – based on the original STS team site."
DisplayCategory="Collaboration" />
</Template>
</Templates>
You can see that I have changed the Template Name to CUSTOMSTS to match the directory we created in SiteTemplates. Title has changed to My Team Site and I have amended the Description field. Save your amendments.
We now have a new directory and a new XML file. At this point we will just have a copy of the “Team Site” site definition.
To get SharePoint to pick up our new changes we will need to reset IIS, so open a command prompt window and enter IISRESET.
Now go back to SharePoint and create a new site – under the Collaboration tab you can see your new site definition, as shown below.
Figure 5 – The Site Creation Page
You will now be able to create a new site based on the My Team Site definition, although it won’t look any different to a normal Team Site. In the next post we’ll apply a custom master template to the site definition.
As always, your comments on my posts are welcome.
Until next time…
