Professional SharePoint® 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007

6.2. Content Types

Content types were introduced to the SharePoint platform in WSS 3.0. In previous versions of SharePoint, each list schema was defined either in a template or on-the-fly. A limitation of this approach is that lists could only contain a specific type of information, which was always tightly coupled with a specific list. Microsoft added the concept of content types in WSS 3.0 to define the underlying schema, business rules, and other metadata on a particular type of information while not explicitly tying it to a specific list. Now a site owner can add multiple types of content to a list by adding content types to the list. This means that now heterogeneous data can be added to the same list. For example, a list named Proposals can now contain both Marketing Proposals and Sales Proposals, each having a unique schema and metadata associated with it.

One very important thing to keep in mind about content types is that by themselves, they store no data. In addition, content types are not defined within the scope of a SharePoint list. Instead, they define the structure of data. It is only when a content type is added to a list that data can conform to the content type. This separation of defining the schema of data from its storage facilitates more content standardization across SharePoint sites. Like site columns, content types are scoped at the SharePoint site level (SPWeb) and reside in a special gallery called the Site Content Type gallery.

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