When I was interviewed for my role here at imason, I was warned: “There is no comfort-zone here -- we expect you to always be reaching beyond your grasp.” Over a year later, this has been borne out time and again.
So it is with my current project where we are trying to bend SharePoint to our will in some weird and wonderful ways that we tried to achieve in other ways but have now resigned ourselves to creating a custom SharePoint site definition to accomplish. Once this solution gets fleshed out a little more, I may post some details -- for now, if you're new to SharePoint this is a worthwhile area to explore as it deals with the mechanics of how the page rendering engine works.
Here are some links I've found that begin to unravel the Caramilk secret of site definitions:
MSDN: Introduction to Templates and Definitions
MSDN: Creating s Site Definition from an Existing Site Definition
MSDN: Introduction to Collaborative Application Markup Language (CAML)
.NET Developer's Journal: Creating Custom Site Defintions in WSS (Kris Syverstad)
Kris Syverstad: Site Defintions and FrontPage: Is there a right answer?
