Site Definitions - Customisation Part I : Cloning

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…