Change Sharepoint Team Site home page

Question

I need to change the page a user gets to when navigating to a sharepoint 2007 team site. What we are trying to achieve for this teamsite is a different page layout to the default. One of the following two things would probably sort this out for me, but I can't figure out how to do either:

1. Change the home page for a team site to a new page I created - e.g. from default.aspx to Shared%20Documents\newhome.aspx
2. Edit the layout of default.aspx for this site only.

The team site in question hasn't been set up. We have Enterprise edition MOSS 2007, so can add whatever features will help us to the Site.

Answer 1

Under Site Settings -> Look and Feel, you can set the Welcome Page to be any other page within the same site (you may have to move your custom page to the Pages library instead of Shared Documents first).

Answer 2

If you have already created the newhome.aspx within SharePoint designer, you can right click it and select "Set as Home Page" within SPD.

HTH, Dan

Answer 3

The welcome page site setting is indeed only available when the publishing features are being activated. Also with for example SharePoint 2010 Foundation, the whole publishing infrastructure is not available at all, so this wouldn't be an option.

What you can perfectly do is use the SharePoint API or PowerShell (in case it would regard SharePoint 2010) to set the welcome page on the RootFolder. This would be like this in C#:

using(var site = new SPSite("http://yoursite"))
{
  using(var web = site.OpenWeb())
  {
    var rootFolder = web.RootFolder;
    rootFolder.WelcomePage = "Pages/Home.aspx";
    rootFolder.Update();
  }
}

In PowerShell, once again when doing this for SharePoint 2010, this would be done using:

Add-PsSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell
$w = get-spweb http://yoursite
$r = $w.RootFolder
$r.WelcomePage = "Pages/Home.aspx"
$r.Update()
$w.Dispose()

Answer 4

You should be able to edit the layout of the default.aspx for the site using SharePoint Designer.