The catalyst for organizing your data into different site containers will often be the same catalyst as for creating multiple subdirectories on the file system. You may have too much information to use a single container and still locate your information easily. If all your files were kept in the root of the hard drive along with the operating system files and other program files, the list of files would be difficult to sort through, work with, and manage. Just as you would create subdirectories to organize your file system data, you likely will create child sites to help organize your SharePoint data in logical ways.

The initial site created in a SharePoint site collection is called the top level site. Top level sites are created from within SharePoint Central Administration because they don’t have a parent site. Although the top level site functionally is not different from its child sites, it includes administrative links on its Site Settings page to manage the site collection.

To create a child site, you must go to the New SharePoint Site page of the would-be parent site by clicking the new subsite link from the Site Contents page.

When you initially create objects like sites, lists, and libraries in SharePoint, you are establishing two name values: the display name, usually labeled Title or Name, and the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) name. Typically, as is the case with sites, there is an option to provide the URL name separately, after the site has been created. The best practices for specifying the URL name are outlined in the sidebar called Naming a URL.

After you’ve provided the title, the optional description and the URL for your new site, you need to choose how to initially provision your site using one of the SharePoint 2013 built-in site templates. Each site template provisions a site structure for a specific purpose, with relevant apps, as well as webpages prepopulated with Web Parts that use the navigation best suited for the purpose of the site template.

The built-in site templates in SharePoint 2013 are grouped together into three categories: Collaboration, Enterprise, and Publishing. Table 5-1 lists the SharePoint 2013 built-in site templates by category.

All collaboration site templates provision a Quick Launch navigation that contains links to the parts of the site. However, the apps and the pages are provisioned differently, depending on the site purpose.

The Team Site template provisions a Documents library that is made more visible by placing a Web Part for it on the site’s default home page for easier collaboration. The Blog site template provides a way to publish a type of journal known as a web log, or a blog. The blog owner creates posts on which other users can comment. Each post is a separate content page, and a rollup summary of these pages is typically presented in reverse chronological order (with newest entries listed first) on the home page of the blog site. Blogs are commonly used as news sites, journals, and diaries. A blog focuses on one or more core competencies of the author and is sometimes used as a soapbox for the blog owner to state an opinion. Blogs can also be used as a one-way communication tool for keeping project stakeholders and team members informed.

The Developer Site template provides a site for developers to create and publish Microsoft Office apps. The Project Site template provisions a site for collaborating on a project, with all information and artifacts relevant to the project available in one place.

The Community Site template provisions an environment for community members to discuss the topics of common interest.

The type of top level site in the site collection where your new site would be located defines the list of built-in templates that are available for your new site. For example, the Publishing templates are not available for site creation in the site collection where the top level site is a Team Site.

You will likely focus, at least initially, on using the built-in site templates. However, it is also possible to save the websites you create as custom site templates that you and others can then choose as a foundation for a new site from the list of Custom site templates on the New SharePoint Site page. When you save the website as a template, a custom web template is created by SharePoint and saved as a file with a .wsp extension. This is done by using the Save site as template link in the Site Action section of the Site Settings page of any site. Custom web templates saved in this way are initially available only in the same site collection in which they are saved. The “Saving and Using a Site Template” section, which appears later in this chapter, explains how to copy a saved web template into another site collection. All alterations, except security-related settings, are retained on those sites provisioned by using saved custom web templates.

After you’ve selected a site template, you need to choose from the two options for site permissions that are listed on the New SharePoint Site page.

The default option, Use same permissions as parent site, checks the parent site’s permission every time the user visits the child site to determine what the user is allowed to do on that site. As the permissions on the parent site change over time, the permissions on the child site also reflect those changes. The other option is Use unique permissions. When you click this option as the site’s creator, you break the permission inheritance and you are initially the only user with access to the site, associated with the Administrator permission level.

You also have two other options for assigning permissions to a new site that are less obvious. If you initially choose Use unique permissions, you are the only user with access to the site and can make any changes you wish. You can then switch to Use same permissions as parent site, whereby everyone who has access to the parent site (including you) will subsequently have access to the child site using the permissions assigned on the parent site. If you initially choose Use same permissions as parent site, the parent site’s permissions will be used. Yet, if you subsequently switch to Use unique permissions, all the permissions of the parent site are copied to the child site. This can save a great deal of time if most of the people who have access to the parent site also need access to the child site.

Having assigned user permissions to your new site, you need to set up navigation options.

Three navigation options can be specified when creating a new site. The first two deal with the visibility of the child site being created within the navigation of the parent site. You can choose to show the child site on either the Quick Launch or the top link bar of the parent site. The former defaults to No, and the latter defaults to Yes. In addition, you can specify whether the top link bar of the parent site should display on the top link bar of the created child site. This setting is referred to as navigation inheritance. The default is No.

In the following exercise, you will create a child site that the buyers at Wide World Importers will use for collaboration. As a team, the buyers need a centralized place to collaborate and share. You will use the Team Site template to provision the new child site.

After you’ve created a site, you can give access to this site to other people in your organization using a Share command. If email has been enabled for your SharePoint installation, you also have an option of sending a message to let people know that they have access to your site.

Sharing a site means granting access permissions to the people you want to use your site. You can assign different levels of access to different people. For example, when you share the site with Edit permission level, users are able to create and modify the site content, including lists and libraries.

If your site inherits permissions from its parent site, when you add users to your new site, they will also have access to the parent site and the sites that share permissions with it. Because of this, you will need to be an administrator of the parent site to be able to share the new child site with other people. If you are not the site administrator, you can still use the Share command to invite people to the site, but your request will be then sent to the site administrator for approval.

In the following exercise, you will share the Buyers site created in the previous exercise with Todd Rowe, the Wide World Importers owner’s assistant.

Information in SharePoint is secured at one of four levels, as follows: site level, list or document library level, folder level, and list item or document level. By default, all lists and libraries inherit the permissions of the site that contains them; all folders inherit the permissions of the list or library that contains them; and all list items or documents inherit the permissions of the folder that contains them.

Selecting the default option, Use same permissions as parent site, provides permissions inheritance from the parent site to a newly created child site. SharePoint checks the parent site’s permission every time the user visits the child site. This is the option you selected when you created the Buyers site earlier in this chapter. If you select the Use unique permissions option when creating a new site, SharePoint initially categorizes users of a new site into three SharePoint groups, as follows:

Selecting the Use unique permissions option breaks the permission inheritance and sets you, as the site’s creator, with sole access to the new site as its owner. After you click Create in the New SharePoint Site page, you are presented with the Set Up Groups for this Site page to add users to the three groups, to provide them with access to the newly created site.

A site can be toggled between inherited permissions and unique permissions using its Permissions page, which you can go to by clicking Site Permissions on the Site Settings page. Once on the Permissions page, choosing Delete unique permissions for a site using unique permissions allows you to toggle the site to have inherited permissions. Choosing Stop inheriting permissions for a site inheriting permissions allows you to toggle the site to have unique permissions. A warning message will display, asking you to confirm your action.

A site using unique permissions has no tie to the parent site, so you are allowed to add and remove users from the site regardless of whether they have permissions on any other site. When users are added to a site, they must be added to a SharePoint group or associated with at least one permission level.

SharePoint groups are maintained at the site collection level and represent a collection of users or groups with a defined set of one or more permission levels and a few governing attributes. When a new user or group is added to a SharePoint group, they are granted the permissions of that group in all sites that the group has access to.

Think of permission levels as a named collection of permissions that can be assigned to SharePoint groups or individual users. There are a number of default permission levels in SharePoint 2013, as follows:

Table 5-2 provides the list of individual permissions and shows the permissions levels that they are included into by default. The individual permissions are grouped into three categories: site permissions for site access, list permissions for lists and libraries access, and personal permissions for personal Web Parts and pages.

When you create a new site based on a site template, SharePoint automatically assigns a predefined set of default SharePoint groups with specific permission levels to the site. For example, default SharePoint groups in a Team site have the following permission levels:

In addition to Visitors, Members, and Owners groups, a Community Site includes the Moderators group with the permission level of Moderate, whereas a Publishing Portal includes the Approvers group with the permission level of Approve, the Designers group with the permission level of Design, and the Hierarchy Managers group with the permission level of Manage Hierarchy.

Not only can you associate existing SharePoint groups and individual users with permission levels, but you can also associate Windows groups (including Active Directory groups and Local Machine groups) with permission levels. This is a very practical approach to providing tight security with minimal maintenance. However, you may not have control over the Windows groups defined in your organization.

Although you can create your own permission levels and even alter all permission levels except for Full Control and Limited, you will likely find the built-in levels to be adequate for most business scenarios. You may also want to provide all users with some level of access to the data on your site; for example, using permission levels of either a Restricted Read or a View Only.

When you share your site using the Share command, you add a user to the SharePoint group that has a permission level that you are assigning to the user. For example, in the previous exercise, the user Todd Rowe was added to the Members group that has an Edit permission level.

After all users and groups are assigned to various permission levels, it is possible—even likely—that someone will be associated with more than one permission level. Rather than enforcing the most restrictive permission level, all associated rights are aggregated and the cumulative list of unique rights apply. This can be overridden only by policies created in SharePoint Central Administration.

In the following exercise, you will break the permission inheritance from a parent site to a child site by changing the permissions for the child site from inheriting permissions from its parent site to using unique permissions. You will then create new SharePoint groups for the child site access, assign a new owner to the site, and grant a Windows group representing Wide World Importers buyers the Edit permission level. You will also remove the child site access from the parent site’s groups, as well as assign the Design permission level to an individual user.

In SharePoint Server 2013, you can create a personal site to save and share your work, and to work with other people. Your new site will be based on a Team Site template but it will not inherit either the navigation or the permission settings of any other site. You will be assigned the site owner permission level, and you will be able to manage site access and share your site with other people.

The site will be created in the location that your administrator has set up for Self Service Site Creation (SSSC). Depending on how SSSC is set up in SharePoint Central Administration, there may be more than one SSSC location available that you can choose from when you create a new site. Your site may be a top level site in a site collection, or a subsite.

You can create a personal site using the new site link on your Sites page that is accessible to you via the global navigation from any location within your SharePoint environment. After the site has been created, it is added to the list of sites that you’re following, which is displayed on your Sites page, and you can access this site from any location. You can share the site with other users, add content to it, and generally use its capabilities as you would with any other Team site that you own.

In the following exercise, you will create a site for a new project, called Vendors, using your Sites page. You will then share your new site with the Buyers group.

The appearance of the default blue SharePoint sites is all right initially, but eventually the sites blur together and start to look too similar. Thankfully, SharePoint provides us with the ability to apply themes to our sites. Themes can radically affect display items such as colors, text, background images, banners, and borders. There are many built-in themes available from which to choose. Each SharePoint site can have its own theme, or you can set several sites so that they all have a common theme and that they are related visually.

Perhaps the buyers at Wide World Importers want to create a theme for their site so that it stands out from other sites. In this exercise, you will go to the Buyers site and apply a theme.

After working with a site, you may want to save it just the way it is so that it can be re-created over and over again. SharePoint facilitates this action by allowing anyone with a Design permission level or higher to save a site as a custom web template. Custom web templates provide a way of packaging up a set of changes to an underlying site definition and making that package available as a template for new sites. Web templates behave in much the same way as built-in templates, in that they provision lists, document libraries, and webpages prepopulated with Web Parts that are best suited for the purpose of the template. In fact, everything in a website, except security-related information, is saved in a custom web template, including its theme and navigation. The contents of all lists and libraries can be included as well.

Every custom web template is based on an underlying site definition and saved as a file with a .wsp extension in the Solution gallery of the site collection.

Once saved, a custom web template is made immediately available throughout the entire site collection in which it is saved. The web template file can be downloaded from the Solution gallery of the current site collection and redeployed to other site collections. When creating a new child site, a user with sufficient permissions to create a child site can select the custom web template from the Custom tab in the Template Selection section in the New SharePoint Site page.

Let’s assume that the unique look that the buyers of Wide World Importers created for their Team site has caught on, and they want to be able to use it repeatedly. In the following exercise, you will save the Buyers site as a web template, and then use it to create another site.

SharePoint features provide site capabilities by grouping together chunks of functionality that developers and administrators can activate to make this combined functionality available at one of four scopes, as follows:

A feature needs to be installed and activated to provide its functionality. For example, there are a number of built-in features that are installed and activated by default in the site collection where the top level site is a Team Site. These features include a Team Collaboration Lists feature that provides collaboration capabilities for a Team site by making document libraries and several lists available, a Site Feed feature that provides the site newsfeed capability, and others.

A feature must be installed in a scope on your SharePoint server farm before you can begin working with it. When you created a custom web template for the Buyers site in the previous exercise, the Web Template feature for this template that provided its functionality was created and activated in the site collection. For example, it is this feature that provides the display of the new template under the Custom tab in the Template Selection section of the New SharePoint Site page.

In the following exercise, you will work with the Site Feed feature that provides the newsfeed functionality. You will first deactivate this feature on the Finance site and verify that the Newsfeed functionality is no longer available on the site. You will then activate this feature to restore the Newsfeed functionality.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a standard way to make new or modified content available to readers of a SharePoint list or document library. Once you subscribe to an RSS feed (the XML emitted from a web request), you can use an RSS aggregator running on your desktop to check for new or modified content as often as you choose.

The aggregator gathers all updates into a common pool of data that can be searched, sorted, filtered, and grouped by the aggregator as directed. RSS content is sometimes described as being “pulled” by the subscribers, for they can easily unsubscribe from a feed at any time. This can be a fabulous way to roll up data entered into a SharePoint list. By default, every web application in SharePoint is configured to allow an RSS feed for all the site collections that they contain.

Site collection administrators can specify whether RSS feeds are allowed on lists in the sites within the site collection; they are allowed by default. Each site can then subsequently specify whether RSS feeds are allowed on lists in the site; they are also allowed by default. If sites do allow feeds, several attributes can be defined that will be included in every feed. In the following exercise, you will verify that RSS is allowed on both the site collection and the top level site, and specify the optional attributes.

There will be times when you want to remove a site that you either created in error or no longer need. SharePoint automatically generates all the necessary user interface elements to create, review, update, manage, and delete your sites.

The creator of the Finance site at Wide World Importers had a change in priorities and no longer needs the site. In this exercise, you will delete the Finance site.