How To Customize SharePoint Site?

SharePoint follows the object model and this contains a large selection of different classes that can be used to deliver different types of SharePoint specific tasks. The object model does offer a way to achieve just about anything that outsourced SharePoint development team may want from the user interface.

One of the tools that offshore SharePoint development team can use for specific tasks such as defining custom site is the SPWebProvisioningProvider class. At the core of customizing a site is quite doable and most offshore SharePoint development companies possess the expertise to implement and deploy the right code.

The First Step For Customizing The Site

In order to start customizing the site, the SharePoint developers need to create a class that is able to inherit from the proper parent and even override one method. The basic code would comprise of:

public class SiteDefProvisioner:
   SPWebProvisioningProvider
{
  public override void Provision(
     SPWebProvisioningProperties props)
  {
    SPWeb site = (SPWeb)props.Web
    site.ApplyWebTemplate("MySiteDef#1");
  }
 }

• Line 1: The line one directly inherits the new class from SPWebProvisioningProvider. This is part of the Microsoft.SharePoint namespace. 
• Line 3: This particular line overrides the provision and configures it accordingly to accept a parameter of SPWebProvisioningProperties.
• Line 5: The line five receives reference from the props parameter for the site that is being created.
• Line 6: This line helps in calling the SPWeb object's ApplyWebTemplate method, thereby adding a string parameter that would contain the template name and site definition.

Undoubtedly, this is the basic coding for creating custom site and the offshore SharePoint development team would need to add further coding for ensuring complete customization of the website.

The Second Step Of Customizing The Provisioner

Outsourced SharePoint development companies will notice that a parameter of type SPWebProvisioningProperties was passed to the Provision method. Another useful property of this object is to pass data into the custom process through a string property named data. This property ideally comprises of any string value but it primarily contains a path with XML files with values that can be used to customize the process of provisioning. Outsourced development team understands the significance of this functionality where XML file approach can be used to pass different configuration values.

The Step Three Of Modifying The Definition Of The Site

Besides the basic coding, the other important modification that SharePoint development team would require for defining the standard site is the registering of custom provision class. Offshore development team can add three attributes to the configuration element in the WEBTEMP_.xml file.

Step Four Of Prevention Of Circular References

SharePoint development companies are aware about the hindrance that circular references may cause because the custom provisioning process is directly attached to a specific configuration of a site definition. Another, point to note is that the classes file calls to the ApplyWebTemplate method to pinpoint which site definition is to apply to the site. In case the name of the site definition and the particular configuration that has been passed to ApplywebTemplate is the same as the attached custom provision process, then there occurs circular reference. In such a scenario, the ideal solution for the offshore SP development team is to develop an empty configuration inside the site's definition ONET.XML file.

Step Five Of Deployment

The final step that outsourced SP development team has to undertake is to compile the custom class into an assembly and then deploying it. The assembly needs to be placed in the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and SharePoint development team need to deploy it through SharePoint Solution (wsp file).

Article Tags: Offshore Sharepoint Development, Sharepoint Development Team, Offshore Sharepoint, Sharepoint Development, Development Team, Development Companies, Site Definition

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