Most people don’t realize that a SharePoint site can have multiple pages. Somehow in the mind of the user the idea that a SharePoint site is a collection of pages is limited to being able to recognize the pages in a list as a part of the site. However, there may be times when multiple pages make sense — for instance, different dashboards for the same site. One might summarize a project overall, another might expose schedule performance, another handles detailed financial performance, etc.
Once you get past the barrier that you can have multiple pages — how do you get them? You add additional pages to a site (if you want them to be ghosted) by adding <File> nodes in the <Module> nodes of the ONET.XML file. That might look something like this:
<File Url=”page01.aspx” NavBarHome=”True” Type=”Ghostable” />
Not too bad but why create extra files on the file system — this would require that you copy default.aspx to page01.aspx. If you add one more attribute and end up with …
<File Url=”page01.aspx” NavBarHome=”True” Type=”Ghostable” Path=“default.aspx“ />
you end up with a page reference in the database which links back to the default.aspx page. You can therefore provision new pages for your sites which will be ghosted — without making copies of your default.aspx. Pretty cool eh?
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