13.3. Summary

The MOSS 2007 web content management components are implemented as part of the Microsoft SharePoint publishing framework, which is deployed as a standard set of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 features. Web designers create master pages to define the overall look and feel of a site, and then use page layouts to specify where the approved content will be injected into the final rendered page. By using master pages and page layout files, web designers can then change the underlying master page at any time, and content authors can select the page layout they want that is most appropriate for the kind of content being developed.

Building a custom WCM solution involves creating one or more custom content types that define the fields associated with the publishing content that will be supplied by content authors, and then associating those content types with one or more page layouts. Page layouts can be created easily using SharePoint Designer 2007, and then deployed using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 features.

Figure 13.14. Figure 13-14

MOSS 2007 supports two methods for authoring web content. Using the web-based approach, content authors edit content directly in a web browser via server controls included in the SharePoint Publishing object model. Using the smart-client approach, content authors create a document in an application such as Microsoft Office Word, and then convert the document into an HTML page using the MOSS 2007 document conversion framework. Document converters are deployed at the Web Application level using a SharePoint feature definition file and a document converter definition file.

Field controls constitute the "heart" of the MOSS 2007 publishing system. Field controls are aptly named because each control is tightly bound to a field (site column) in the underlying content type associated with a page layout. Field controls essentially define a mapping from one or more columns of the document library item to content which appears somewhere on the page when it is rendered.

The MOSS 2007 variations architecture introduces the concept of a variation label to synchronize published content. As content is published to the source site, the SharePoint publishing framework then propagates the content automatically from the source to the target sites.