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

2.2. SharePoint Site Topology

The topology and structure of a WSS site, as well as the site collection in which the site lives, is very important to WCM developers. To best understand it, it is easiest to look at the topology of a WSS site and site collection from the top-down approach. As shown in Figure 2-3, the entry point for all SharePoint sites is the Web application. The previous section explained how a Web application is just another name for an IIS Web site and the folder structure that makes up the Web application.

Figure 2-3. Figure 2-3

Web applications host SharePoint site collections. Web applications can also contain more than one site collection. Recall that a site collection is an administrative and management construct within SharePoint. Many capabilities are scoped within a specific site collection and do not cross to other site collections, such as the scope of a search query created using the Content Query Web Part in a WCM site (the Content Query Web Part is covered in detail in Chapter 11).

Developers can use the Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebApplication class to obtain a reference to an existing SharePoint extended Web application to perform administrative tasks such as setting the number of days the "New!" icon appears next to new list items and documents:

SPWebApplication webApp = SPWebApplication.Lookup(new Uri("http://wss")); webApp.DaysToShowNewIndicator ...