SharePoint Site Definitions: Why You Need Them and How to Use Them
The site definition process in SharePoint is complex, but very flexible. Techniques such as "ghosting" can save you a lot of server space and beef up performance. But you need to understand when and how to use site definitions in order to avoid unintended consequences down the line.
by Robert Bogue
March 25, 2005
harePoint makes developing templates easy. You simply create a site the way that you want it and then save it as a template, quickly and easily freezing the site setup into a reusable stamp that you can then use to create other sites. However, user templates in SharePoint can lead to performance problems and may not be the best approach if you're trying to create a set of reusable templates for an entire organization. Instead, you should use site definitions to create templates that form the basis for creating new sites. The site definitions approach doesn't suffer from the same limitations as user templates.
Understanding Ghosting and Unghosting
Before diving into site definitions it's important to understand one of the inner workings of SharePoint. When you create a new site, SharePoint doesn't really copy the pages for that site— default.aspx and so on—into a new database table or directory. These files exist once and only once on each of the front end Web servers. Instead, SharePoint creates a reference to those files in the database tables that define the new site, a process called "ghosting." The outcome is that the site appears to have its own unique pages, but the pages are actually shared across all sites that use the same definition.
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harePoint makes developing templates easy. You simply create a site the way that you want it and then save it as a template, quickly and easily freezing the site setup into a reusable stamp that you can then use to create other sites. However, user templates in SharePoint can lead to performance problems and may not be the best approach if you're trying to create a set of reusable templates for an entire organization. Instead, you should use site definitions to create templates that form the basis for creating new sites. The site definitions approach doesn't suffer from the same limitations as user templates.
