Site Directory allows your users to find site collection on the portal by using categories which you can define. Site Directory has been around since MOSS and due to upgrade compatibility issues from MOSS – it has been turned off by default.
Let’s take a look at how it can be enabled and used.
1. Locate the following file on your SharePoint server: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\1033\XML\webtempsps.xml
2. This is where all out of the box site templates live. Open the file and locate the following line in XML:
<Template Name="SPSSITES" ID="34">
3. Change the value of Hidden property in configuration node to False
<Configuration ID="0" Title="Site Directory" Type="0" Hidden="False" ....
Now, the site directory template will be visible and you can create new site based of that template as shown below:
Once created, navigate to the following list: http://[site directory url]/SitesList
This is where all of your site collection will be listed. If you take a look at the list fields, you will find some standard category fields such as Region etc. Values from those fields will appear to users when creating new site collections; which is how SharePoint will categorize sites into various categories in the directory.
You can change values in those fields and their display to facilitate your requirements. In fact you can rename the existing fields and those will still be referenced by their internal name. This is what my user will see when creating a site collection, after I rename Region field and assign my custom values to other field:
Enjoy!
