Being on the road all the time means also that you probably are going to end up spending your birthday abroad. Yesterday and today I am in Athens (Greece) for the technical part of the MOSS 2007 Sales Enablement Tour. Those of you who know me a bit better, know that I love the Greek culture so I am really happy to be here (although only for two days). So I know some of you reading the blog want to read more about the trips I am making and what kind of experiences I go through. Well, yesterday was very quiet, spending my evening with my girlfriend MOSS trying to come up with cool demos for the TechEd Europe session. So we were very creative and tried out a lot of new things. This of course after a nice dinner. I treated myself and took the bottle of wine up in my room. Just missed some candles to make it very romantic :). Sick isn't it.
Anyway, do you know that publishing portals are provisioned in a different way than team sites? Basically, the portal is created based on a script, made available via the InternetBlank.xml file in 12\Template\XML folder. This script is the input for a provisioning engine, the ProvisionAssembly, that is part of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.dll. Take a look at the WEBTEMPSPS.XML in the 12\Template\1033\XML folder for the definition of it. This is pretty cool because what you can do is create your own script and have for example a complete site hierarchy created at once when the user selects your entry in the list of templates. I have documented the whole procedure in the upcoming MSPress book 'Inside MOSS 2007'. But if you take a quick look, you will understand instantly the power of all of it.