Sharepoint Sites

Question

I am a developer and I have set up a Sharepoint test environment with WSS3 and created a few sites, lists and folders.

I am a little confused about managing Sharepoint Sites from the Sharepoint web interface, I have a site which doesn't seem to appear on management pages.

I have my central admin on port 23179, another site on 80 and a site on 1339.

• 1339
  • Documents
    • Documancer
  • Lists
    • Tst List
    • Second List
    • WRong
    • aafas
  • Sites
    • Frog
    • Marshmellow

This is an example of the layout under "View all Site content" How ever the first website I created (I don't remember how I did it to be honest) doesn't show up here, even though I created it on 1339.

I can access it through it's URL localhost:1339/sites/test/ I'm just surprised it is missing from a central location.

I need to understand how Sharepoint organises these sites and folders as I am trying to build a navigation browser, split into trees by site>folder>items.

Answer 1

SharePoint has several organizational levels, from high to low:

• Farm
• WebApplication
• Site Collection
• Web
• List
• Item

Each level can contain multiple items of the lower 'levels'. Thus a farm can contain multiple WebApplications, which can contain multiple site collections, which can contain multiple webs (subsites), which can contain multiple lists (and documentlibraries), which can contain multiple (list)items.

What you created are probably 3 web applications on specific ports (Central Admin on 23179, one on port 80 and one on port 1339). In each Web application you can create multiple site collections. Probably you made a 'root'-site collection in the web app on port 1339 and an other site-collection (named 'Test') at the managed path 'sites' in the same Web Application.

Normally Site Collections do not 'know' about each other existence. This is why you don't see the 'other' site collection (at /sites/test) in the Root SiteCollection. (at /) although they are both contained in the same ('1339') web application.

You can check this in Central Administration. Go to 'Application Management'. Here you can get an overview of available Web Applications ('Web Application List') and a list of available Site Collections ('Site Collection List') per Web App. In the Site Collection list you can choose which Web App to list the sites in (top right).