Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

800 Part IX: Maintaining a Server in Windows SharePoint Services
Windows SharePoint Services. You can use the programming model to make
website customizations such as adding, editing, deleting, and retrieving data
from SharePoint lists; creating new lists and setting list metadata (such as the
fields in a list); working with documents in document libraries; and performing
administrative tasks such as creating websites, adding users, and creating roles.
In any deployment, all three tools will likely be used to customize your sites.
Whatever method you use to customize websites, you must have the following
rights, all of which are included in the Web Designer and Administrator site groups
by default:
■ Manage Lists
■ Add and Customize Pages
■ Apply Themes and Borders
■ Apply Style Sheets
Other users of your site cannot gain access to the pages required to perform
these tasks unless you specifically assign them to a site group that contains these
rights.
This chapter and the following chapter will introduce you to basic concepts
that will allow you to complete customization tasks by using default tools such as
the browser and the Stsadm command-line tool, and by replacing files on the file
system.
Customizing Web Part Pages
Before we can talk about customizing any of the portal sites, we must cover certain
basic concepts. The majority of sites created using Microsoft SharePoint Products
and Technologies consist of Web Part Pages, which are special Web pages that contain
one or more Web Parts. Web Parts are reusable components that can contain
any kind of Web-based information, including analytical, collaborative, and database
information. See Chapter 31, “Working with Web Parts,” for more information.
There are two kind of Web Part Pages: ghosted and unghosted. Ghosted
pages are pages stored on the file system that do not come from the child virtual
directories _layouts and _vti_bin. Unghosted pages are stored in the database. Applications
such as FrontPage 2003 can customize ghosted and unghosted Web Part
Pages. A ghosted page becomes unghosted once the page or one of its properties
has been modified—for example, by using FrontPage 2003. The main reasons for
SharePoint Products and Technologies to store some templates in the file system
(ghosted) and some in the database (unghosted) have to do with security and scalability.
For more information on ghosted and unghosted Web Part Pages, see Chapter
37, “Using Visual Studio .NET to Create Web Parts.”