Publication End Date displayed

I've just had a request from our tester that the PublishingConsole.ascx control display the publication end date. Looking at the code, I thought no problem, as the publication start date, version and status are displayed, the end date must be exposed as well! Quick trip into MSDN to see the properties of the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls to see the name guessing that it would be something similar the the PagePublishDateIndicator or the PublishingPageVersionIndicator and, you've guessed it, the end date is not exposed as an indicator.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sharepoint.publishing.webcontrols.aspx

Site Definition Viewer

I came across this handy little tool for viewing Site Definition files.

More Deployment Issues

Having struggled with this for what seems like an eternity - and has since resulted in the project being put back by some considerable margin - it was reading through some more blogs that I came across what seemed to be the solution to the Masterpage problem (see previous posts).

By developing a feature that will create a site based upon a specific Masterpage and have it deploy correctly, the feature creation was OK and seemed to work but the associated contentTypes I could get to be created at the same time. After a lot of time yesterday the feature installed, but only at a site level because if the scope is changed to 'Farm' or 'Web' it would not install. So with this in mind I copied the relevant files to the WFE and installed/activated the feature. Created a new site on the backend as it was created as required and then ran the deployment - guess what the Masterpage was reset again!!!!

This has gone beyond a joke and I would recommend anyone thinking about going down the customization and deployment routes to seriously consider the time and resources required.

We will be raising this issue with our Gold Supplier and get them to raise a ticket with MS.

Create a Custom Site Definition

I just came across this article by Eric Shupps on how to create a custom site definition. It looks as though it may help in the deployment issues where custom masterpages are not carried across to the WFE.