Understanding SharePoint Features

By Cory

First… What Is a Feature?

A feature is a mechanism to deploy and activate customizations to a SharePoint environment. Features can be activated in the user interface empowering the administrator or end user with the ability to easily enable or disable a customization. Features are made of a manifest or feature.xml, one or many additional element XML files and additional resource files if applicable. Read more at MSDN. The most important benefit to features is that they can be deployed with Solution Packages (WSP), using solution packages will keep you in a supported, restorable state and encourages developers to focus on deployment and packaging during the initial phases of development which is extremely important. Read more »

SharePoint Permission Strings

By Cory

SharePoint uses permission or rights strings in numerous places including setting permissions for Custom Actions in your feature XML. A colleague asked this question recently and I had to lookup the answer so I decided I would post for my own reference.
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Deploying Publishing Content Types via Site Definition

By Cory

First let me say welcome to my blog!

Recently I’ve been working on a project that involved some heavy branding of a custom publishing site.

I had to create the following custom items:

• Publishing Site Definitions
• Master Pages
• Site Columns
• Content Types (Using the custom site columns)
• Page Layouts (Using the custom content types)
• Images
• CSS Files

All of this had to be deployable via features and solutions.

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