Given the tag line I'll bet you guessed this post is going to have a SharePoint Designer theme. I was in a brilliant talk by Eric Shupps (the SharePoint Cowboy) on branding and custom site definitions (more of which in a later post) when he reminded everybody that SharePoint Developer is now available as a free download and what it was and was not good for:
PROS:
- Design Surface
- Simple Deploy
- Extensive layout control
- Utilise with minimal programming skills
- Versioning
CONS:
- Can only use on a single site collection at a time
- Requires unghosting
- Limited options for advanced functionality
- Not portable
So looking at the list why would you use it? Especially since unghosting means that the modified page is held in the database instead of being cached!
The answer is not often but there are occasions where it is useful:
- Prototyping master and layout pages
- On small sites where performance is not an issue
- Where you want to empower Power Users and allow them to make small modifications to a few pages
For most things the site definition route should be taken, more of which later.