Provisioning Site Pages

Today I'd like to talk about provisioning pages in a feature. Sometimes your customer wants to add some content to the pages you provision, and/or to have some web parts on them.. If that's the case, application pages will not do - they live on the file system (more specifically, LAYOUTS on the hive, or some subfolder of LAYOUTS), and you cannot add web parts to them.

Provisioning site pages using Visual Studio 2010 is a little harder than provisioning application pages - after all, there is no such an item template as "Site Page" or "Web Part Page." So, you will need to use a workaround.

First of all, you need to remember that when you provision files, you do so via modules. Luckily, there is such an item template. When you create a module, an Elements.xml file and a Sample.txt files are added to your Visual Studio 2010 project.

Rename Sample.txt to YourSitePage.aspx (or whatever name you'd like to use for your page), and add the following:

Note that in the PlaceHolderMain, I am creating a new web part zone, called MainWebPartZone (feel free to rename it if you don't like this name.) This is where the web part will live on this page.

Also add a class to your module and name it YourSitePage.aspx.cs.  This will be the code-behind class for your page.

The next step is configuring the module. If you want your user to treat your page as a library item, you need to provision it as ghostable in library. In the CDATA section, insert the full contents of the .webpart file (except the processing instruction!) In my example, the new page is provisioned in the Pages library.