Comments on: Provisioning Publishing Pages using Features declarative markup

By: MOSSist

MOSSist — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:25:20 +0000

Man, you're fantastic!
Exactly what I needed – I work in an organisation which doesn't allow any editing in the Prod environment – everything must be provisioned through WSP's.

By: David Jacobus

David Jacobus — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:19:07 +0000

You can provision a publishing page based upon a feature in SharePoint. Pretty easy! When adding web parts to the page that must be acomplished via a feature receiver, payihg attention to check out, and check in of the page. If you would like to see the code, email me

By: Nick Hadlee

Nick Hadlee — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:20:52 +0000

Sorry I wasn't very clear in my last question. I meant if you make a change to the page layout that the page references and then deploy that. I don't mean changing which layout the page uses.

E.g: Make a change to the feature based page layout and then do a feature upgrade to deploy the change. A UI provisioned page will show the changes from the page layout but the feature provisioned page will not. The onyl way I have made the provisioned page show the changes is by reghosting it. Kind of limiting factor if you have a lot of these type of pages deployed which I am hoping is not a "by design" thing.

By: Waldek Mastykarz

Waldek Mastykarz — Wed, 20 May 2009 05:11:31 +0000

@Nick Hadlee: I haven't tested changing the Page Layout yet. As changing anything else in SharePoint I wouldn't expect this to work declaratively and would use code instead.

By: Nick Hadlee

Nick Hadlee — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:12:15 +0000

I've been having a bit of a discussion with Chris O'Brien regarding some behavior I have noticed when using this exact approach. He pointed me to your post so…

Have you tested/needed to update the page layout the provisioned page relies on and seen whether the provisioned page reflects these updates? So far I have only managed to make the page take on the page layout changes by a dettach/reatttach type hack.

Cheers,
Nick Hadlee

By: Waldek Mastykarz

Waldek Mastykarz — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:35:09 +0000

@Marius C.: if it was only about preparing the environment a PowerShell script would a suitable solution in my opinion. As I prefer to have the configuration separated from the code however, I'd rather have XML and then an engine to parse it and do the job. Sure you could create such engine using PowerShell but why bother if it's already available within SharePoint AND it's supported by Microsoft?

By: Marius C.

Marius C. — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:43:24 +0000

Really nice investigation indeed! However, if the customer really wants the ready-system, shouldn't a list back using one of available Powershell scripts (Fabrice Romerland has one on CodePlex) should be also an option, considering that Pages Library is still a Library afterall? (Obviously we assume that content types are already pre-defined accordingly)!
Still it remains the problem of customized vs uncustomized pages on subsequent stages, updates..etc. (stsadmextractfiles extension is really usefull to extract all SP designer changed files from Content DB).

Regards, Marius C.

By: Waldek Mastykarz

Waldek Mastykarz — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:18:43 +0000

@Andy: you can bind a Content Type to a List either programmatically or declaratively. To do that declaratively you can use the ContentTypeBinding element of a Feature (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa543152.aspx)

By: Andy Burns

Andy Burns — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:53:36 +0000

"Content Type must be bound to the Pages Library"

Damn – that's exactly the problem I had a week ago. I should've thought of that. It's a bit frustrating though, the way that if you go to a Pages library and click on, "New > Article Page" it takes you to a list of all the available content types for the site – I wouldn't expect that. And then the available content types is determined by the 'Page Layouts' section of the 'Site Settings' – I didn't expect that either.

So it's all a bit confused as to how important that binding to the library itself is – but I must have missed doing that in my site definition. Damn.

Thanks for describing the problem though. Do you have code on how to do that binding declaratively?