Some basic information about activating features in the onet.xml can be found on the MSDN site.

So the general format is something like this

<Feature  Id = “Text”  SourceVersion = “Text”>
</Feature>

Also SourceVersion hasn’t been documented very well. Source Version is the version of the feature that you would like to activate. In general I leave the version away so that the latest version of the feature will be activated.

So you could add something like this to your onet.xml:

<Feature ID=”94C94CA6-B32F-4da9-A9E3-1F3D343D7ECB”>
        <!– Office SharePoint Server Publishing –>
</Feature>

I’ve always thought that relying on a comment in order to make it clearer what each feature does is a bit uggly.

Since i’ve enabled Intellisense in my VS2010 environment I discovered the following Name option:

<Feature ID=”4ed36276-5dcc-4c1a-89b0-209de9477b1f” Name=”My Feature” />

At last my list of active features is a lot clearer and shorter.

This option doesn’t seem to be documented on msdn unfortunately, but I’ve really started to like it.

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications and Office Apps & Services Microsoft MVP working as a Microsoft Productivity Principal Consultant at HybrIT Services. You can contact me using contact@veenstra.me.uk.

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