Thursday, August 06, 2009

Keep your SharePoint site definitions minimal, really I mean it.

Something which caused me a lot of troubles last week – an overbloated site definition. Don’t do this. As stated in the ten commandments for SharePoint development:

4. Keep your custom site definitions as minimal as possible. A long debate started after Joel's post on the topic - Do you really need a site definition . They are nothing more than a "skeleton" for attaching programmatic elements in the form of features and should be deployed as solution packages.

Trust me – follow this advice, it will cause less problems in the future.

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1 comment:

Robbert Nijhoff said...

Minimal = ONET.XML (WSS, can also be used with MOSS) with:
NavBars
DocumentTemplates
Configuration with
SiteFeatures and WebFeatures
ServerEmailFooter
ListDefinitions (custom lists) = (Site)Feature
ListInstances (default list instances with custom list instances) = WebFeature
Modules (eg default.aspx) = WebFeature
Done.