Creating the Community Site

To get started we will need to provision a new site collection to hold our solution, activate the supporting features, and create a landing page to support our community.

In this case I have selected a Team Site template because it is a good generic building block for sites like this, and it can also be used to create Web Templates that can be used to provision additional sites in the future.

See Choosing a Site Template section in Chapter 1, Building an Effective Intranet for additional background information on the available site templates.

Activating supporting features

After choosing a site template and creating the site collection, the next step is to activate the initial features needed to support the Community site. The robust feature deployment and activation system supported in SharePoint makes it very easy to fine tune the functionality available within a site, since individual features can be activated as they are required. In many cases these features...