How to Create a Blog Site with a Feature Receiver

So there I was a few months ago asked to work on a SharePoint 2010 project. The project was to add a blogging site to an existing public website. The site uses SharePoint 2010. One of my first tasks was to create a feature receiver to accomplish the creation of the blog site. Having never written a feature receiver, I found it to be a very interesting experience.

The Steps
Here are the steps of what my feature receiver had to do.

1. Create a blog publishing site off of the main site collection. So the URL would be www.mainsite.com/blog.
So in the feature activated method, we set a class level variable to the SPWeb and call the other methods in the class.

 public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        {

            //initialization

            SPWeb web = ((SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent).RootWeb;

            

            this.CreateBlogSite(web);

            this.CreateSiteColumns(web);

            this.CreateContentTypesAndLists(web);

            this.CreateBloggingPages(web);

        }

2. Create the blog site if it does not already exist.

 private void CreateBlogSite(SPWeb web)

        {

            var blogWeb = web.Webs.Where(p => p.Name.ToLower() == "blog");

            if (!blogWeb.Any())

            {

                this._blogSite = RP.SPWebUtility.CreatePublishingSubSite(web, Constants.BlogSubSiteUrl, Constants.BlogSubSiteName, Constants.SharepointBlogSiteTemplate);

            }

            else

            {

                this._blogSite = blogWeb.First();

            }    

        }

3. Create new site columns for the blog information. In my case there were two columns, body and description.

   private void CreateSiteColumns(SPWeb web)

        {

            if (!web.Fields.ContainsField(Constants.SiteColumnBlogPostBody))

            {

                RP.SPWebUtility.CreateSiteColumn(web, Constants.SiteColumnBlogPostBody, Constants.ContentTypeGroup, SPFieldType.Note, false);

            }



            if (!web.Fields.ContainsField(Constants.SiteColumnBlogPostDescription))

            {

                RP.SPWebUtility.CreateSiteColumn(web, Constants.SiteColumnBlogPostDescription, Constants.ContentTypeGroup, SPFieldType.Note, false);

            }

        }

4. Create a new blog content type and add it to the out of the box post list. I also set properties on the post list and add other existing fields.

 private void CreateContentTypesAndLists(SPWeb web)

        {

            var postsList = this._blogSite.Lists.TryGetList(Constants.BlogPostsListName);

            string[] sparkBlogColumns = { Constants.SiteColumnBlogPostBody, Constants.SiteColumnBlogPostDescription, Constants.SiteColumnCapabilityLookup, Constants.SiteColumnDepartmentLookup, Constants.SiteColumnExpertLookup, Constants.SiteColumnProjectLookup, Constants.SiteColumnTopicLookup, Constants.SiteColumnSEOTitle, Constants.SiteColumnSEOKeywords, Constants.SiteColumnSEODescription };

            var sparkBlogPostContentType = web.ContentTypes[Constants.ContentTypeSparkBlogPost];

            if (sparkBlogPostContentType == null)

            {

                sparkBlogPostContentType = RP.SPWebUtility.CreateContentType(web, Constants.ContentTypeBlogPost, Constants.ContentTypeSparkBlogPost, Constants.ContentTypeIdSparkBlogPost, Constants.ContentTypeGroup, sparkBlogColumns);

                RP.SPListUtility.AssociateListWithContentTypes(postsList, sparkBlogPostContentType);

                if (postsList != null)

                {

                    postsList.ContentTypesEnabled = true;

                    postsList.Fields[Constants.SiteColumnBlogCategory].Hidden = true;

                    postsList.Fields[Constants.SiteColumnBlogCategory].Update();

                    postsList.ContentTypes[Constants.ContentTypeBlogPost].Hidden = true;

                    postsList.ContentTypes[Constants.ContentTypeBlogPost].Update();

                    postsList.Fields[Constants.SiteColumnExpertLookup].Required = true;

                    postsList.Fields[Constants.SiteColumnExpertLookup].Update();

                    postsList.Update();

                }

            }

        }

5. Create the blog home page and blog post page and add the appropriate web parts to the pages.

   private void CreateBloggingPages(SPWeb web)

        {

            ////Home Page

            PublishingWeb pubweb = PublishingWeb.GetPublishingWeb(this._blogSite);

            var layout = pubweb.GetAvailablePageLayouts().FirstOrDefault(l => l.Name == Constants.PageFileNameBlogPageLayout);

            var url = pubweb.Url;



            if (pubweb.GetPublishingPage(string.Format("{0}{1}{2}", url, "/pages/", Constants.PageFileNameBlogHome)) == null)

            {

                PublishingPage homePage = pubweb.AddPublishingPage(Constants.PageFileNameBlogHome, layout);



                this._blogSite.AddWebpartsToPage(homePage.Url, ZoneLeft, new[]

                {

                    WebPartFactory.BlogPostList("Blog Post List")

                });



                this._blogSite.AddWebpartsToPage(homePage.Url, ZoneRight, new[]

                {

                    WebPartFactory.PromotionalBox("Our Community", RenderMode.Standard, false)

                });



                pubweb.DefaultPage = homePage.ListItem.File;

                pubweb.Update();

                homePage.CheckIn("Checked in by Blog feature activation");

                homePage.ListItem.File.Publish("Published by Blog feature activation");

            }

            ////Post Page

            if (pubweb.GetPublishingPage(string.Format("{0}{1}{2}", url, "/pages/", Constants.PageFileNameBlogPost)) == null)

            {

                PublishingPage blogPage = pubweb.AddPublishingPage(Constants.PageFileNameBlogPost, layout);



                this._blogSite.AddWebpartsToPage(blogPage.Url, ZoneHeader, new[]

                {

                    WebPartFactory.BlogHeader("Blog Header")

                });



                this._blogSite.AddWebpartsToPage(blogPage.Url, ZoneTopLeft, new[]

                {

                    WebPartFactory.BlogPost("Blog Post Body")

                });



                this._blogSite.AddWebpartsToPage(blogPage.Url, ZoneLeft, new[]

                {

                    WebPartFactory.BlogComments("Blog Post Comments"),

                });



                this._blogSite.AddWebpartsToPage(blogPage.Url, ZoneRight, new[]

                {

                    WebPartFactory.BlogAboutTheAuthor("About The Author"),

                    WebPartFactory.ShareThis("Share This Blog Post")

                });



                blogPage.CheckIn("Checked in by Blog feature activation");

                blogPage.ListItem.File.Publish("Published by Blog feature activation");

            }

        }

The Conclusion
Creating a blog site with pages is easy as 152 lines of code. It works well and runs really fast when being activated.