Sharepoint Services

Feature Stapling in Sharepoint: Meeting Workspaces

// February 10th, 2009 // Sharepoint

I see feature stapling as an extension to the standard features, which allow you to make modifications or add functionality to a site after it has been created. It is the best way to extend Sharepoint functionality and is the supported way to make changes to any existing sites.

Recently i came up with a problem of how I would Change the masterpage of a particular Workspace (actually a meeting workspace attached to an events list). Chris Johnson’s Feature Stapling Article helped me to do just this. As he explains, you can make modifications to any site using a feature and simply stapling it to a site. Heres how i did it!

 

1. First create a new WSPBuilder Project in Visual Studio
2. Create folder structure as detailed below:

   

3. Open your class file, mine is BardEventsWorkspace.cs, it should be similar to this below. Don’t forget to use Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation;

   

4. Open BardEventWorkspace folder and open the feature.xml. It should look similar to the following:

    

   

5. Open the BardEventsWorkspaceStapler folder and open the elements.xml. It should look similar to the following:

    

   

   Each one of the “FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation” nodes represents the site which I want to staple the original feature to. In this case it’s all the meeting workspaces. Also the Id should be the same as the feature. In this case “2B3451F0-BC93-41A4-9FAD-3A81861D651A”. See step 4.

    

6. Open the BardEventsWorkspaceStapler folder and open the feature.xml. It should look similar to the following:

    

   

7. On your solution, right click your solution and click “WSPBuilder” then “Build WSP” as shown below:

   

    

8. Using the Sharepoint Installer Project, add your WSP to the folder and change the setup.exe.config such that it is similar to the screenshot below:

   

9. Deploy!