SharePoint 2010 ships with 3 new master pages additionally to the default.master page Let's review those pages: v4.master Team site masterpage User content pages (lists\content pages\etc) _layouts pages (site settings, etc) minimal.master For app experiences, like Search or Office Web Applications If you do not need site navigation If you do not have a ribbon If your app needs the space simple.master For error pages or login...

The SPUtility.HandleAccessDenied method provides the functionality to redirect users to the standard "Access Denied Page" pragmatically, thus asking them to re-logon. One of the scenarios of such usage is the public sites, where access to the standard SharePoint specific pages still exists and you want to block those pages (source) However, you can handle access denied exception via SPSecurity.CatchAccessDeniedException = true (source)

When you try to print the SharePoint 2010 page you will find that site header and navigation is printed with you content. Very often you don't need that service information and would like to see the page content only.  This can be easily done via the custom CSS  that turns off the unnecessary elements from the printing. SharePoint 2010 made a step ahead in supporting the page printing, because you need to turn off the elements you don't want to see, and all content is rendered by default. ...

SharePoint 2010 Site Changes Role/Rule based Audience Targeting – added rules-based audiences, WSS groups and distribution list membership. Sites are collection of pages - SharePoint 2010 sites became more page-focused rather than a collection a lists. Sites still contain the same list and libraries as previous versions of SharePoint, but the site is now a collection of pages. Pages are optimized for Reading – all WCM pages are optimized for the reading, rather than for the writing, ...

SharePoint crawling options provide the "Crawl complex URL" option, that applicable on the site with URL that contain a query parameter specified with a question mark (for example, www.mysite.com/list.aspx?item=1). Depending upon the site, these URLs might or might not include relevant content. Complex URLs can often redirect to less relevant sites, and it might be a good idea to enable this option on only sites where the content available from complex URLs is known to be relevant. Bu...

SharePoint provides Auditing functionality to track what happening with sites, collections and farms via audit settings and policies . Unfortunately, there are no OOTB features, providing detailed item-level audit - how much times site items were viewed, copied, deleted and etc. The good side is that SharePoint object mode provides you API to implement custom audit for your site items. Everything you need is to obtain a reference to an SPSite object for the current site collection, and then s...

Question: >> How to find out the content DB name for one site collection when there are multi content DBs under one application Answer: The easiest way to find the content DB for a site is to install Microsoft SharePoint Administration Toolkit and then navigate to the "Central Administration --> Application Management --> Move, Lock and Delete Site Collections", where you can find the content DB names for your sites  

Intro Ken Zheng posted a good overview of how to create a Site Collection in new Content Database http://littletalk.wordpress.com/2008/10/10/creating-a-site-collection-in-a-new-content-database/ I’d like to add some notes to Ken’s post, regarding planning site collections and sub-sites among different content databases. There are some reasons, why you could have several content databases: MS recommends to have content database not more the 100Gb, otherwise it could hinder perform...

SharePoint Site Template has one very handy feature – it can be registered inside a Site or you can restrict certain sites to use only certain templates. It’s obvious how to do this for site collection, because UI provides you specific links, but it’s a bit tricky to assign templates for a Site, so do the following: 1) Upload an existing site template to the site template gallery (Site  Settings –> Modify All Site Settings –> “Site Templates") link under the "Galleries" se...

SharePoint provides you a nice feature to save you site as template and install it easily on another instance of SharePoint. But have you noted that for Publishing sites you don’t have “Save site as template option” option?! (located before “Reset to site definition”) Unfortunately, such functionality is unsupported for all Publishing SharePoint sites, because it quite potential can cause issues with some features and master pages - “instance of master pages and style sheets stor...