Feature Stapling – the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread

OK, that may be a mild exaggeration, but the best thing I learned today was in a session co-presented by SharePoint genius, and my co-worker, Ishai Sagi.

If you don’t know how SharePoint Features work, take a quick look at the SDK as it can explain it far better than I can. Essentially what feature stapling allows you to do is piggyback features into a specific existing site definition without actually altering that site definition. Since you can implement just about any type of SharePoint functionality as a feature, including creating lists, content types, content, changing site settings, adding UI elements, and so on, that means you can easily customise out of the box site definitions.

SHEESH! I wish I had payed more attention to this six months ago– it would have saved me so many headaches.

I did a quick search and found this very thorough blog post by Chris Johnson from November last year that covers how to do it. A big thank you to Ishai and Milan Gross for introducing this concept to me.