Sharepoint Variations

Over the October - December, 2008 time frame, I finally a project that involved variations. I had poked around in the Publishing variations class a little and saw some cool stuff there, but was never able to find any really good posts or webparts that peeked my interest enough to pull me away from my current work load.

Then I got lucky enough to be involved in a project where Variations were a prime need. First, a little info about variations:

• Variations are part of a Publishing Site. In the site collection settings of a publishing site, you can see the controls at the bottom of the right most column. These settings include:
  1. Variations
  2. Variation Labels
  3. Variation Logs
  4. Translatable Columns
• Interestingly enough, using variations and creating the heirarchy in Sharepoint creates links to the sites on the quick launch, but does not expose the Variations control, which you have to manually uncomment out in the VariationsLabelMenu.ascx page in ControlTemplates. This control exposes a dropdownlist that contains the list variations and a post back to load the selected variation type. (Note: Exploring the code behind this control in the Mircosoft.Sharepoint.Publishing.VariationsLabelEcbMenu class can teach you a lot about how Sharepoint handles Variation Labels and navigation.)

More Later...