Useful and (free!) SharePoint "Features" available at http://www.CodePlex.com/Features
Occasionally, I ask SharePoint professionals, who have done interesting and useful work to post a guest blog entry here, so their contributions can deservedly get more exposure within the SharePoint community. This is certainly one such case. Scot Hillier, SharePoint MVP and author of the recently published Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# and VB books, has developed a bunch of very useful Features that you can leverage for your SharePoint environment. Read on and enjoy.
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For developers creating solutions with SharePoint, Features are the most important and powerful capability available. Features provide an atomic deployment model that allows them to move easily from development to production. When deployed as solution files, administrators can easily roll them out to new sites without additional assistance. I often tell students and customers that they should have a bias toward creating SharePoint solutions that are based on Features first. In previous versions of SharePoint, developers generally created solutions using web parts or custom applications. In SharePoint 2007, however, all customization techniques should primarily be viewed as components of Features rather than complete solutions unto themselves. For more information on Features, go to the MSDN technical reference here.
When implementing SharePoint within an organization, I often find that I receive the same requests over and over again. For example, many organizations want to “push” alerts at groups of users whether or not they have subscribed to certain content. Others want specific customizations to lists such as the addition of presence information or tracked comments. Almost everyone wants to create new sites with a designated theme and master page. All of these requests are ideal candidates for Features because they are atomic and can be used in many situations.
This need to reuse solutions – and the recognition that many organizations need the same ones – was the motivation for my “Features” project available at www.codeplex.com/features. The goal of the project is to collect common types of Features that either solve particular problems or represent often requested functionality. The project is an evolving one that uses some of my ideas as well as contributions from the SharePoint community. I would like for others to contribute to the project either directly or by suggesting areas where Features are needed. (There are also a few dozen other SharePoint oriented projects on CodePlex worth checking out.)
Minimal Publishing Site
- This Feature creates a minimal publishing site for use in MOSS that can be used as a starting point for creating public Internet sites. It is based on the Publishing template that ships with MOSS, but the style sheets, graphics, and page layouts have been removed.
Just the basics remain in the Minimal Publishing site
Print List
- This Feature adds a "Print List" menu item to the "Actions" menu for every list in the site collection. This Feature is based on the sample found here and is used with the permission of the author.
A printer-friendly view of a list
Theme Changer
- This Feature changes the site theme and alternate style sheet to those specified in the FEATURE.XML file. This Feature is ideal for changing the site theme and Alternate CSS when a new site is created.
Placeholder Master
- This Feature adds a new master page to the gallery named "Placeholder.master". This master page shows all of the placeholders and their content in a table structure so you can easily see what content is rendered in which placeholder. This Feature is useful for understanding how placeholders are used in master pages and which ones you would have to change when creating a custom master page.
Showing placeholder content
Presence Contact List
- This is a contact list modified to show presence information as a drop-down associated with the e-mail field. This Feature is based on the code posted here.
Presence information in a custom list
Content Type Hierarchy
- This Feature presents the site content types in a hierarchical view. It shows the relationships between the content types, including hidden types.
Content Type Hierarchy
Log Viewer
- This is a Feature for viewing the Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs through the SharePoint Central Administration site.
Viewing Log Files
Scot Hillier
http://www.shillier.com
