Creating child sites under a Publishing Portal

Every time I create a new site collection I regularly forget to enable the use of different site templates below the top-level site. Invariably that means I’m limited to using the Publishing Site with Workflow template—fine for most of what I do despite the “with Workflow” bit adding extra hassle but I usually end up thinking you can’t create sites using other templates a child sites below a Publishing Portal.

Well that’s just silly—the extra site templates simply need to be made available through Site Settings –> Page layouts and site templates. Select the individual templates you want to make accessible or select Subsites can use any site template and you’re off. No features to activate in one of four different locations, no config to change, easy unless your memory is like sieve.

Ps. Zabi has posted a nice visual walkthrough showing you exactly how to make this change.

Choosing the right MOSS site template

It’s a bit old now but Todd Baginski has posted some really great resources about the differences between the various OOB MOSS site templates.

http://www.toddbaginski.com/blog/archive/2007/06/29/which-wss-3.0-moss-2007-site-template-is.aspx

Creating a new Article on a SharePoint Wiki site Results in a File Not Found Error

I haven’t played with the OOB MOSS 2007 site templates for a while and after someone at work asked about MOSS blog capabilities I decided a refresher was in order. As you may have read we run a successful wiki in the office, hosted on the MediaWiki platform; we briefly ran a MOSS wiki on our intranet but it didn’t really take off and it looked like rubbish. With that baggage, I wanted to have a good hash around a clean wiki site and see how it compares with MediaWiki.

New web application –> new site collection –> Wiki Site

…success and straight into it, ignoring all of the rather verbose SharePoint UI text. Wiki site created and I create a forward link from the default article to create my first page. Enter an article name and some dummy text and Save…

File Not Found

Thanks MOSS for another great error message—it must have found something because viewing the Wiki library I see my article listed. That said, this behaviour was easily repeated and I had nothing of interest in the event log. Google didn’t return much either until I stumbled upon an unrelated post suggesting a trusty old IISRESET. In my haste and being fatigued, I realised I’d forgotten to reset IIS—as instructed by SharePoint after creating my new web app. And behold problem solved. I can create wiki articles to my heart’s content—IISRESET always has been and always will be a god among men in my eyes.

And yeah, the MOSS blog stuff I thought is pretty good (comparing with Blogger) and the wiki bits are a bit simplistic but adequate with a nicer WSIWYG editor than MediaWiki’s (I really like the Incoming Links bit). Next steps: make the blog look like www.westernaustralia.com… keep your eyes peeled!