Hide Site Definitions via a Feature

Creating site definitions is a good way to deploy customisations for different projects or clients. However if they all run on the same farm, how do you stop users from creating sites based on the wrong project?

By default if you create a site definition, it will appear in the Site Actions -> Create Site sites list (publishing feature), unless you have limited the site templates available through site settings. 

But what if you dont want to allow the site owners access to provide these templates to their users? You can restrict it at the Site Definition level.

1. Create an empty site feature called something like ‘Project.EnableSiteTemplates’ (set hidden=”TRUE” if you want to control the feature activation via Site Def or STSADM only – not through Site Settings) 
2. In the webtemp*.xml for your site definition, in each <Configuration> template node set the VisibilityFeatureDependency property to the GUID of your newly created feature so that the site only appears for users to select in Create Site box when that feature has been activated. eg. VisibilityFeatureDependency=”7C30466D-62A2-43eb-99EB-7650E5D14B77″
3. In your onet.xml file of the project Site Definition, enable the ’Project.EnableSiteTemplates’ feature in the <SiteFeatures> section, so when your new site collection is created it also enables your site templates for this project. 

This is the same principle behind hiding sites based on publishing infrastructure until the prerequisite features for Publishing have been enabled.

Note: The Site Owner will actually see and be able to select the custom site templates on the ‘Page Layout and Site Template Settings’ page even when the feature is not activate on the site collection. However nobody can actually see the site on the ‘Create Site’ page until the feature is activated.

Comparing to a time in a CQWP

I had been struggling to find out how to compare a time in a CAML statement for a while now (not that I was looking particularly hard though). To do a date comparison is easy using the <Today/> tag, but I was (and still am!) confused as to why the <Now/> tag doesn’t work in the query, as it’s listed in the SDK. Very frustrating!

However I came across this blog on the Microsoft ECM team blog, where buried in the comments trail there was a little gem!

Normally to compare a date in a Query override you would use something like:

<Geq><FieldRef Name=”Expires” /><Value Type=”DateTime”><Today /></Value></Geq>

this will compare the whole date, so if the items date is today it will be included, no matter what the time. If you want to compare the time also, you need to add this IncludeTimeValue attribute to the Value tag:

<Geq><FieldRef Name=”Expires” /><Value Type=”DateTime” IncludeTimeValue=”TRUE”><Today /></Value></Geq>

Pretty simple, one of those annoying little bits of crucial info that’s really hard to find!

ServerTemplate Numbers

I’ve put these here because I keep having to trawl the web for these numbers each time I want to do a CQWP… Next time I’ll just print them out antd stick them to the wall!

100	Generic list
101	Document library
102	Survey
103	Links list
104	Announcements list
105	Contacts list
106	Events list
107	Tasks list
108	Discussion board
109	Picture library
110	Data sources
111	Site template gallery
112	User Information list
113	Web Part gallery
114	List template gallery
115	XML Form library
116	Master pages gallery
117	No-Code Workflows
118	Custom Workflow Process
119	Wiki Page library
120	Custom grid for a list
130	Data Connection library
140	Workflow History
150	Gantt Tasks list
200	Meeting Series list
201	Meeting Agenda list
202	Meeting Attendees list
204	Meeting Decisions list
207	Meeting Objectives list
210	Meeting text box
211	Meeting Things To Bring list
212	Meeting Workspace Pages list
300	Portal Sites list
301	Blog Posts list
302	Blog Comments list
303	Blog Categories list
850	Page Library
1100	Issue tracking
1200	Administrator tasks list
2002	Personal document library
2003	Private document library

SP1 Publishing Additions

The other day I stumbled across some new additions to the properties of publishing pages that MOSS Service Pack 1 has given us.

If you view the properties of a Publishing page, you can now see that the Schedule End Date has some extra email review options.

Never – send a content review. This can be used if you don’t want the page to actually expire and disappear on a certain date, but you can now send a regular email to authors reminding them to update their content. Before SP1 you had to write some code to achieve this.

On the following date – Notify Page Contact prior to end date. Now with SP1 you can set this option to send an email before the page expires. Very handy for easy setting of automatic reminders.

Page Contact – With SP1 you can now add a contact picture if you manually add a contact rather than picking a SP user.

Pre-SP1 publishing screen