Book Image

Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development

Book Image

Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development

Overview of this book

Microsoft Content Management Server 2002 is a dynamic web publishing system with which you can build websites quickly and cost-efficiently. MCMS provides the administration, authoring, and data management functionality, and you provide the website interface, logic, and workflow. Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server (SPS) also features in the book. SPS 2003 enables enterprises to deploy an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so that people can take advantage of relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently.You've mastered the basics of MCMS, and setup your own MCMS installation. You've only scratched the surface. This book is your gateway to squeezing every penny from your investment in MCMS and SPS, and making these two applications work together to provide an outstanding richness of content delivery and easy maintainability. As a developer, the Publishing API (PAPI) is at the heart of your work with MCMS, and this book starts by taking you on the most detailed tour of the PAPI you will find anywhere. As a live example, a component that reveals the structure of your MCMS site is created, taking you through how to manage the common elements of MCMS programmatically. Getting SharePoint and MCMS to work together is the next stop in the book. You will see how to use SharePoint's search engine to search MCMS content, publish content between the two systems, and create SharePoint Web Parts to draw content from MCMS.To ease your everyday work with MCMS, there are chapters on placeholder validation, and some useful custom placeholders for common MCMS tasks, such as a date-time picker, a placeholder for multiple attachments, and a DataGrid placeholder among others. There are a number of ways to consume MCMS content from the outside world, and we look at two exciting ways here; RSS and InfoPath/Web Services. The InfoPath solution provides another interface to MCMS content that allows content authors to concentrate on content and not the presentation. The book is rounded off with a number of must-have MCMS tips and tricks. Revert a posting to a previous version Change a postingÔø???s template Build a recycle bin Deal with links to deleted resources Update a postingÔø???s properties directly from a template file Re-write ugly URLs to friendly URLs Export resource gallery items using the site deployment API (SDAPI) Configure the position and size of the Web Author Console Dialogs Get frames and IFrames to work correctly in a template file
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Index

Managing Channels and Postings


Imagine a scenario where you have been asked to move contents of a legacy web portal to MCMS. The portal contains hundreds of channels and thousands of postings. One option is to hire someone to manually create the channels and postings, copying and pasting the HTML content from the old pages to the new postings and approving each and every one of them. That’s definitely a viable solution but let’s imagine hiring is not an option and despite the generous offer of free doughnuts and coffee, none of your co-workers are willing to take on the task. So it comes down to you, and you are understandably a little horrified at the scale of the task. Fortunately, rather than doing all the work manually, you can write a script to automate the task.

Another use of the Publishing API could be to perform complex actions such as: “When Channel A is created, postings B, C and D must be automatically created in Channel E.” However complex the scenario may be, you can customize...