How to Publish a Content Type in SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 introduces a new concept called Content Type Hubs. It's a way to make content types available centrally and be reusable in the Farm. This is a huge improvement from SharePoint 2007 both in terms of management of content types and the overall flexibility that comes with it. In SharePoint 2007 there is no way to manage Content type centrally. SharePoint 2010 has provided out-of-the-box support for sharing Content Types across the farm level. First, we need to create a content type in a site collection and we have to publish that. We will be seeing how to do that in this article.

How to publish Content-Type

First, select a site collection as a place to host your content types. You will define your content types to share across, this site collection. You can create a new site collection or use an existing one. Once you have a site collection in your hand, create a content type and for this discussion let's name it CentralizedCT. Given below are the following steps to be followed to create a new content type that has to be published.

Steps Involved

1. Go to the site collection where you want to host your content Type.

2. Go to Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Galleries ->Site Content Types.

3. In the top right you can see Create, click Create.

4. Enter the name of the content type as CentralizedCT as shown in the below figure.

5. Click OK to create a new content type named CentralizedCT.

6. Go to Site Content Type Information and click Add from New Site Column.

7. Enter the name for the column as an Employee ID as shown in the below figure.

8. A new field has been added to the content type.

Activate the feature to enable content publishing in the site collection

The site collection, which will host content types for publishing, is known as the content type hub. To enable your site collection to be a content-type hub you need to activate a feature known as "Content Type Syndication Hub".