Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 Administrator's Companion

Including Features in Site Definitions

Web-scoped and Site-scoped Features can also be deployed via site definitions. Site definitions form the basis from which to create SharePoint sites. For example, the default Team Site template is created from the default STS site definition. You can create your own custom site definitions to define specific functionality for sites, such as custom lists or content types, and you can add that functionality using Features.

In Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, a major advantage of creating site definitions as opposed to effecting change using FrontPage 2003 was the fact that sites provisioned from site definitions remained ghosted. With ghosted site definitions, the pages and templates in those sites were called ...