Beginning SharePoint® Designer 2010

Chapter 4. Publishing Pages

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• Web Content Management in SharePoint

• The features enabled by the SharePoint publishing infrastructure

• The components of SharePoint publishing pages

• More about master pages

• How to build page layouts and their underlying content types

In Chapter 3, you learned the basics of how pages were assembled in SharePoint, and how to customize the overall layout of a site by editing master pages. This chapter builds upon that knowledge by introducing the publishing infrastructure and web content management (WCM) features of SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Designer 2010.

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT OVERVIEW

Early in this book, it was pointed out that SharePoint Designer 2010 is not a tool for creating web content (pages). Rather, it is primarily a tool for controlling the presentation of that content. SharePoint Server 2010 itself is the tool by which that content is created and managed. In other words, SharePoint Server 2010 acts as a web content management (WCM) system.

Web content management is a set of processes that lets you manage the life cycle of the information stored and presented by your website — wherein you create, customize, deploy, and dispose of web content. The content life cycle starts when content is created, whether manually through human effort, or as the output of an automated system or application. It completes when that content reaches its final disposition, which may be anything from simple deletion, through relocation ...