SharePoint Portal Server 2003 Experience (Part 2)
In Part 1, I talked mostly about redesigning the presentation layer of your SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) website. What I would like to cover now is modifying other aspects not directly linked to the standard website design process.
Supporting Other File Types
One of the things you will most likely want to add is the ability to accommodate file types beyond what ships with SPS. You need four things to make this happen. Below are the steps required to add a PDF document type to your portal. Replace “PDF” with any other file extension to do the same.
1) Change the Index settings to include this file type:
- Navigate to: Site Settings > Configure Search and Indexing > Include File Types
- Add the “pdf” extension.
2) Modify the *\TEMPLATE\XML\DOCICON.XML file:
- Open this file in Notepad or whatever text editor you want and add this line to the other like elements:
<Mapping Key="pdf" Value="pdf16.gif"/>
3) Add an IFilter that is created just for the file type.
- In this case, there just so happens to be an IFilter for this document type. You can download it with installation instructions here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpid=1276
- IFilters allow you to full-text search the document type. Not all document types have an appropriate filter, but don’t fear, everything else will work fine.
4) Add an image of the ICON associated with that file type:
- Once you have a 16x16 gif of the ICON associated with this file type, copy it into *\TEMPLATE\IMAGES\ as these two file names: ICPDF.GIF and PDF16.GIF.
Here is a KB article that basically says the same:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;832809
FrontPage Ghosting
In Part 1, I mentioned that FrontPage caused some headaches with “ghosting”. Ghosting is essentially SPS’s terminology for caching page content. When you edit a page and save it in FrontPage, not only does it add a bunch of crap that you usually don’t need, but it also stores ALL of the page content directly in the database. This makes sense since that is the fundamental process SPS uses to load content for your viewing pleasure. However, this destroys any inheritance from template pages, meaning any design changes you make to the template pages will not be applied to this now “unghosted” page. There is a fix, but it requires some SQL knowledge. Because of the potential problems you could encounter, I am not going to spell it out, but I will point you in the right direction:
1) Open the SITENAME_SITE database.
2) Open the DOCS table and find the exact page you are trying to “unghost”.
3) Write a SQL statement to set that rows CONTENT field to NULL.
Your page will now be “ghost-able” again.
Silly FrontPage.
QuickLaunch Watermark
Another thing you may want to change on your SPS site is that vertical “SharePoint Portal Server” logo located in the QuickLaunch area. This is easily done by simply finding and replacing any occurrence of "SharePoint Portal Server" in *\TEMPLATE\1033\default.aspx (and a couple others) with whatever your want.
Global Templates
So you finally design a SITE that you would like to use as a template for other sites that are not children of this site. This link will explain how to create a template you can use with new sites, among other things:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/wss/2/all/adminguide/en-us/stsh05.mspx
* = C:\program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\60