Professional Microsoft® SharePoint® Designer 2007

5.3. Web Part Pages

You can create many types of pages and files with SharePoint Designer, and use most of them on a SharePoint site. You can even display SharePoint content on some of them (general .ASPX pages, for example); however, in most cases, you need to manually generate many of your own user interface components. While there may be times this is exactly what you want or need to do (and this book assumes you have the fundamental web design skills to do so), most of the time you will be better served by using SharePoint Web Part Pages.

Virtually all of the pages you see in SharePoint are forms of the Web Part Page. Technically, a Web Part Page is any .ASPX page inheriting from the Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPage assembly. In practice, most SharePoint Web Part Pages have the following key characteristics:

• They are .ASPX (ASP.NET) form pages.

• They use a .NET Master Page that contains SharePoint-related placeholders (including the requisite WebPartPage inheritance just mentioned).

• The content area contains one or more Web Part Zones.

There are a number of Web Part Page templates provided with SharePoint, which can be instantiated in a document library by end users. Users can then add and connect Web Parts through the web interface. You can add and connect Web Parts through SharePoint Designer as well. In addition, with SharePoint Designer, you can fully customize the content area of these pages.

Although you can edit pages based on these templates from within ...