Web Edit in SharePoint 2010 – Or Is It?

We’ve all seen the new page edits on the team site in SharePoint 2010 and been pretty impressed, haven’t we?

Well, I’m not sure about you, but I would like to know a bit more about what’s going on behind the scenes. And when I found out, I was a bit disappointed.

It turns out, the fancy new front page of the team site is just a wiki page. It’s actually a feature that creates a new wiki page for you and sets that page as the front page of the team site, or whatever site in which you activate the feature.

You can see this in the sneak peek videos in that the front page of the team site that Tom Rizzo is demonstrating has a URL of /SitePages/home.aspx.

Here’s the feature and it’s description:

Wiki Page Home Page

This site feature will create a wiki page and set it as your site home page.

This text came from a comment that was posted to my blog a couple of weeks ago with all the features and their descriptions listed. I haven’t posted that comment yet, but perhaps I will shortly…

The feature itself contains a feature activated handler that ensures that the wiki page library exists, as well as an attachments list for the wiki page library. It then provisions the new wiki home page to the wiki library.

The code also stores the old home page so that you can dectivate the feature and return to your old page. Finally, the code sets the WelcomePage property of the root folder in the SPWeb in order to send users to the new wiki page.

The ‘old’ default.aspx is still the same, familiar, and somewhat boring Announcements, Calendar, Logo, and Links. Deactivate the Wiki Page Home Page feature, and you’re back to WSS3, more or less :-)

True, inline editing is still cool, but no revolution as at least I believed when I saw the video the first time. The features you see demonstrated can easily be implemented in WSS3 as well.

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