Building an Accessible Internet Site with WCM: Setting Up the Solution

Latest project is to create an Internet site using MOSS that complies with accessibility web standards.

First step was a LOT of research. I found plenty of useful articles by Heather Solomon, Zac Smith, Cameron Moll and others, plus dashings of negative comments about quite how non-standard is the HTML pumped out by SharePoint. Sounds like a fair bit of work ahead!

During my travels around the web, I came across a nice idea from Phil Wicklund on managing SharePoint development across a team. The great thing about starting a new project is that it gives the opportunity to apply best practices, so I am combining Phil's approach of reproducing the 12 hive folder structure, but will be deploying via a feature rather than via Xcopy. The downside of this is that deployment during development is slower, but I prefer to always build the WSP file as this sorts out any deployment issues very early in the development cycle. Having a package deployable from the command-line is closer to allowing some form of continous integration, too.