Including meta tags for pages on Internet-facing websites is very important. Additional information included in meta tags makes it easier for search engines to find and classify the content. Still many websites either don’t use meta tags at all or don’t provide content editors with a simple mechanism for managing the meta tags making managing the meta tags a one-time process. In many situations meta tags are not even a part of the information architecture for Internet-facing websites and are easily being forgotten in the development process. Additionally, as they are not being displayed on the screen, they are not a part of the branding what makes it challenging for the developers to provide an intuitive editing interface for. Mavention Meta Fields is a turn-key solution that allows you to easily add support for managing page-level meta tags even if your website is almost ready to go on-line.

The new Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developer Tools ship with Replaceable Parameters which allow you to provide values for SharePoint solution items whose actual values are not known at the design time. And while the Replaceable Parameters are without a doubt a great improvement in the development process, there is one problem with them: there are quite a few of them and looking up the right one might get you out of element when developing. And this is exactly where Mavention Replaceable Parameters Snippets come in.

Many popular Web Content Management Systems allow you to reuse content across the site. Once published you can then include (fragments of) the page in other places on your website, providing a seamless experience to your visitors. And if you ever need to change something, you can do it in one place and those changes will be automatically pushed to all other locations. Reusing content is probably one of the most desired capabilities in WCM, so it’s pretty surprising that it isn’t available out of the box in SharePoint 2010. While SharePoint 2010 has the concept of Reusable Content it’s meant more for creating small content snippets rather than using it for republishing content on your website. And this is exactly where Mavention Virtual Pages gets useful.

Last year I wrote an article about programmatically provisioning Variation Hierarchies in SharePoint 2007. The point of that article was that there was really no way you could provision Variations in repeatable way in a supported fashion and had to use reflection to get the job done. The situation in SharePoint 2010 has changed a little. The process of creating Variations has been made more reliable my moving it completely to a Timer Job. So a new approach, requires new code, and here it is.

Claims Based Authentication introduced with SharePoint 2010 allows you to login to a SharePoint site using multiple Authentication Providers. In some scenario you might need to determine which Claims Authentication Type has been used to login in order to conditionally show some content. Find out how this can be done using the new Claims API provided with SharePoint 2010.