Changing OOB content types on selected lists

Question

My customer want to have a global taxonomy for all content. I have created content types that inherit from the usual content types (Documents, Pictures, Pages) that will contain this taxonomy.

To keep the contributors of the sites from creating rogue document libraries, pages libraries and picture libraries that does not have the custom content type, I want both the list i provision using my custom web templates, and the lists created by users afterwards to use my content types rather than the OOB ones.

My suggestion is to use the SPListEventReceiver.ListAdded that we have now in SP2010, possibly setting SPEventReceiverSynchronization to Synchronous.

I'm pondering if this is the best way of achieving this, and wanted some input on better ways of doing this, caveats etc. Any input appreciated.

Answer 1

I don't see a problem with your suggested approach. In fact, it was the first idea that came to my mind as well.

How are you going to stop users from using the library settings to change the default back to OOTB CT's? You might want to add an event receiver that cancels document adding operations if content type requirements are not met, just as an extra precaution.

Answer 2

I had this exact request from a client. I created an "unstapler" feature. It was simply a feature receiver that deactivated features from a semicolon delimited list of GUIDs. So while I had one feature to activate my custom list definitions, I used this feature to deactivate the OOTB list definitions that I wanted to replace:

<FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation Id="EAD66289-5E7E-45D5-8B93-56AC416DCB0F" TemplateName="BLANKINTERNET#0">
    <Property Key="FeatureIds" Value="00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101;00bfea71-52d4-45b3-b544-b1c71b620109;00bfea71-ec85-4903-972d-ebe475780106" />
</FeatureSiteTemplateAssociation>

The second part was changing the master page so that Site Actions > New Document Library would point to the custom list definition instead of the OOTB document library:

<SharePoint:MenuItemTemplate runat="server" id="MenuItem_CreateDocLib"
    Text="<%$Resources:wss,siteactions_createdoclib%>"
    Description="<%$Resources:wss,siteactions_createdoclibdesc%>"
    ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/NewDocLibHH.png"
    MenuGroupId="200"
    Sequence="220"
    UseShortId="true"
    ClientOnClickScriptContainingPrefixedUrl="if (LaunchCreateHandler('DocLib')) { GoToPage('~site/_layouts/new.aspx?FeatureId={00bfea71-e717-4e80-aa17-d0c71b360101}&amp;ListTemplate=101') }"
    PermissionsString="ManageLists"
    PermissionMode="Any"
    VisibilityFeatureId="00BFEA71-E717-4E80-AA17-D0C71B360101" />

I changed ClientOnClickScriptContainingPrefixedUrl to:

GoToPage('~site/_layouts/new.aspx?FeatureId={9C982E22-33F4-4A0A-82F9-19596A9045D0}&ListTemplate=100316')

and VisibilityFeatureId to:

9C982E22-33F4-4A0A-82F9-19596A9045D0