SharePointers

I had a page layout that I liked, but I needed a slightly different version, so I copied the original, made my edits, redeployed my solution and provisioned a page with the new layout. BAM! A big fat error: Only Content controls are allowed directly in a content page that contains Content controls. Whats the deal? Everything looked exactly like the previous, working layout... or so I thought. The copy and paste apparently changed some of the <asp:Content> controls to <asp:content>, which SharePoint does not like. Re-capitalizing my tags fixed the issue.

I updated my page layouts that I deployed as a feature, but found that I could not overwrite the Layout File. The solution was to add a new page layout and then you would have to associate the new layout with every page on your site that used it. Obviously with a site of any size you'd have a lot of manual work to get this done, so doing it programmatically makes for a much better (and thorough) approach. After you've got your new page layouts, you could do something like this (in your event receiver class): public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties) { //replace current page layouts with new page layouts on all pages SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; SwapPageLayout(web, "FullWidthContentWithTitleV1.aspx", "FullWidthContentWithTitleV2.aspx"); } private void SwapPageLayout(SPWeb web, string oldPageLayoutName, string newPageLayoutName) { PublishingWeb pubWeb = PublishingWeb.GetPu...

This next tutorial will show you how to create a page layout. I have to admit that the bulk of the content of this tutorial comes from a tutorial written here , however, there are a few errors in the example code provided and also STSDEV requires a few minor changes as well to get everything working. In addition, I'll try to elaborate on a few more things so that you get a better understanding. Now let's dig in. Introduction If you have no experience with page layouts (and Master Pages), I suggest you read the Page Layouts and Master Pages page on MSDN . In short, page layouts allow you to customize the layout and appearance of content and web parts of pages within a MOSS publishing site. These pages are stored in a special Master Page and Page Layouts document library. Pages that are based off these Page Layouts will be stored in a 'Pages' document library at the root of the site. The nice thing about using the publishing infrastructure is that it lets you sav...

I plan to write a start to finish tutorial on using STSDEV to create a simple page layout and feature receiver, but I don't have the time to do it right now and I wanted to share this tip: When you are creating a feature that contains a page layout and you want that page layout to be copied over to your server, ensure you include the .aspx page as an <ElementFile> element into your feature.xml file. If you are hand writing your own manifest, you don't have to do it, but if you want STSDEV to do it for you you'll need this element.