SharePoint 2007: Portal Listings

I was reading the following entry Scott Jamison's Information Worker Blog: Where did portal listings go in MOSS 2007?

I've had several customers upgrade from SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007. A popular question is "Where did the Listings functionality go?"

In short, Portal Listings are gone in MOSS. Since listings were just an SPS-centric way of creating a link to something, it didn't make sense to have a non-standard way of doing this.  In an upgrade, they are converted into a List and Content Type called "Listing". The Portal Listings Web Part is replaced with a Content Query Web Part, which is much more flexible.  So no functionality is lost; it's actually more functionality than SPS.

Likewise, Areas are also gone...everything is simply a site.  They have been replaced by various publishing templates.

These two items (listings and areas) were SPS-centric and didn't make sense to carry forward.

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Microsoft explains the conversion from SharePoint 2003 this way:

 

“By default, Listings are upgraded to the Content By Query Web Part. This Web Part uses a query to display items in a Links list. The query is configured through Web Part properties. For more authoring and presentation control, consider manually moving Listings links to the Summary Links Web Part after upgrade.”

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Here’s a tutorial for the Summary Link Web Part: Use and configure a Summary Link Web Part or a Summary Link field control. I made a quick attempt at creating one, but received a strange error on spdev01 when I attempted to add links.