WCMexport version 1.0

When you’re branding a site using SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management, you really want to spend your time changing Master Pages and Page Layouts. But you often find that you spend a lot of your time editing your Feature.xml and different Elements.xml files especially if you have a lot of different Page Layouts with web parts for different parts of the site.

WCMexport is a small utility which can help you if you don’t like doing all the editing of the xml-files from scratch.

With WCMexport you can use SharePoint Designer or what other tool you want to create the Master Pages, Page Layouts and Style Library Files on a development site. Once you’re done and want to create your feature, you can just:

1. Start WCMexport
2. Enter the url of you site
3. Press enter or click “Get Content”
4. Select the files you want included in your Feature
5. Click “Export”
6. Select the location and name of your Feature.xml file WCMexport will then create your Feature.xml, “Elements”.xml files and sub-directories in the location you specified for your Feature.xml file.

There is a few things WCMexport will do that you might not expect:

• It uses the SharePoint object model so it needs to run on the server
• If your filename or description starts with an _ (underscore) WCMexport will remove it. (This enables you to add your generated feature back to the same site for testing if you just get into the habit or adding the _ when you create files using SPD)
• If multiple Page Layouts has the same HTML then WCMexport will only create one file and have the other Page Layouts reuse this file (This is helpful if you have multiple Page Layouts which only differ in which content type they support or which web-parts are present)
• Preview Images are put into “_catalog/masterpage/Preview Images” regardless of where you have them on your source site
• You may still have to edit the generated files to add more content and make your Manifest.xml and .ddf file, but my hope is that WCMexport still will be a great help for you in your WCM development.

You find a zip file with WCMexport 1.0 here and the source code here.