As I have previously mentioned, I have been working through learning how to customize WSSv3. I have decided to give my adventures a code name; 'murphy's law'. I cannot think of one step in my learning process that has not been riddled with problems. To re-cap, my adventures started some time last August when I asked my manager why it was that we had so many portal sites to keep all of our knowledge around. To that I was told, that I should take ownership of getting them all organized....Great ;-)!
At the time MOSS and WSSv3 was still in beta and had just been released as Beta 2 TR. That is where I jumped in. Previously, my only experience with sharepoint was with v2 as a user and not much more. I was a user of the out of the box experience.
For the new site, the direction I was given was that we wanted a custom site definition that would have both public and private content. The public content would be site where corporate users can come and get some information about the team, their projects and other such information. The site would also have a 'sub-site' that would be patterened after a team site with the main difference being that we would be utilizing Wiki's instead of FAQ and Discussions.
So off I went trying to figure out the 'right' way to do it and came to the conclusion that because this layout would be used across a variety of teams, that I wanted to create a custom site definition. So I spent the next few months reading up on whatever I could which, as with any beta technology, was not much.
Since I could not find much at the time and the official launch was more than a month away, I decided to start to learn about how to customize the master pages since that was an easier mountain to tackle. Since I had a template to work from, I started off modifying the master pages to make them look like the 'template' site. At first this was not trivial because I had to figure out of some undocumented things such as how $Resources is used.
Flash forward to November/December timeframe when the final relases had been out for a couple of months. Finally infomation about how to set up site definitions was starting to come out and a book called "Developer's Guide To Windows SharePoint Services 3.0" was released.
The book is amazing but that is for a different write up. Armed with a decent knowledge, I set off to create a site definition. Then all of a sudden "Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Tools: Visual Studio 2005 Extensions" was released.
This is where project 'murphy's law' earned it's name. I will be talking about this in more detail over the next couple of posts.