Part 1 - Improvements to the core SharePoint platform & benefits to WCM

I’ve waiting to write this post for a long time. Actually… I’m going to break it up into three parts… in this first part I want to take a moment and talk about what is important to take note of the things that changed around and under WCM that directly impact it in a positive way:

• Cleaner Markup: a common gripe about the verbose table-based design. In Microsoft SharePoint Foundation (MSF), what we used to know as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 (just rebranded) did quite a bit of work including:
  • UI implementation is no longer table-based… it’s pixel perfect (via CSS)
  • All those CSS classes were factored and cleaned up quite a bit…and they are all documented in the SDK now!
  • XHTML compliance… yup… they heard us and addressed it. This directly impacts accessibility in a positive way.
  • JavaScript and CSS libraries are compressed / mimified / crunched… whatever you want to call it OOTB (and you can get the uncrunched version of SP.JS by looking at SP.DEBUG.JS).

• Server Ribbon - I’m sure you’ve seen the ribbon, or what’s known as the Fluent UI, in SharePoint. Authoring in a WCM site is no longer a unique experience… it’s just like the rest of SharePoint and fully integrated in the ribbon.
• Reduced Postbacks / Page Refreshes: now the only time the page refreshes in the authoring process is when the context of the page changes… no more interruption in authoring!

That’s just a sample of some of the big things I see that directly impact WCM but aren’t part of WCM and rather part of the core MSF. There are plenty more, but these are the hot button things for me.

Now… the next two posts will talk about what’s improved and what’s new with SharePoint Server 2010 Web Content Management: