STSADM

I wanted to do a presentation at the local SharePoint user group meeting recently and decided that I should show how to build a custom extension. I decided that rather than use an existing one I would build a new command from scratch.

I had some free time one night and decided to work on something that I’d had several people ask me about – extending a web application programmatically. Honestly I was surprised at how many people had specifically asked me to create this command.

I’ve mentioned a few times on my blog that I was going to post a sample install script which can be used to set up and configure a basic MOSS install (will also work with WSS but you’ll need to pull a lot out) and now I’ve finally got around to actually doing it.

I finally got around to doing what I should have done a LONG time ago – I’ve modified my source so that it now builds a WSP file when I build the project.

If you’re trying to configure a site for anonymous access via stsadm you can get most of the way using the out of the box extendvs (or my createwebapp) and authentication commands.

I decided I would make it easier for people who wish to create their own stsadm templates. I’ve gone ahead and created a CodePlex project http://www.codeplex.com/customstsadmtemplate) where you can download a starter project based on my custom commands.

In my last post I wrote about a command that I created to export site columns to an xml file because I needed the data for a Feature I was working on.

As I mentioned in my previous post about the gl-exportcontenttypes command I need to be able to quickly and easily get the CAML necessary to recreate site columns in a Feature.

I was recently working on a client project where there was an environment already setup with several custom content types and custom site columns that had been created. We wanted to reverse engineer those content types and columns so that we could create a Feature that could be used to deploy them into the various environments.

So you’ve got a content database (perhaps you used the gl-createcontentdb command) and now you want to create a site collection in that database. Problem is that you can’t do this easily via the browser and you definitely can’t do it via stsadm.