What are the changes in Site Definition or onet.xml file of Blog site in SharePoint 2013 from 2010?

Question

We have a "Blog" folder inside the 15 hive folder "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\15\TEMPLATE\SiteTemplates" in the Server where SharePoint 2013 is installed. Inside it has xml\onet.xml file. In the onet.xml file, it looks like as below

Fig 1: Onet.xml of SharePoint 2013

What I wanted to show is this xml does not have any child List inside the "Configurations\Configuration\Lists" node. If look at the onet.xml file of SharePoint 2010, then it has 5 List as shown in fig below.

Fig 2: Onet.xml of SharePoint 2010

As far as I know, the SharePoint (2010 or 2013) server creates the List as defined in these List nodes when a new site of Blog Template is created.

There is not a List node in case of SharePoint 2013 but there is a "Blog Feature" (Id=FAF00902-6BAB-4583-BD02-84DB191801D8" as shown in Fig 1).

If go and open the Elements.xml file of Blog feature, it has just ListTemplate nodes but not any ListInstance node.

So, I was wondering, how SharePoint 2013 determines/knows that it should create "Posts", "Comments", "Category" and "Photos" library when a new Blog site is created.

Could please shed any light on this? or Is there any changes in 15 hive structure than in 14 hive?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In SharePoint 2013, there is a Feature Receiver Class in the Blog Site Template, where it activates the "BlogContent" feature - which in turn adds the Post, Comments, Category and Photo lists. We can see this information using the reflector.