Hello everyone, since a few days, I became involved in building a large Internet portal for one of the most famous publication group in the Middle East, they have an intention for using Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 to provide the portal framework for authoring and publishing daily news content.

During my research I have read many articles regarding Web Content Management (WCM) in SharePoint 2007, we may need to identify the main outlines or most significant issues which we should consider for building such publishing portal.

The first issue is to understand the new WCM in SharePoint Services 3.0 which include:

• Understanding page model
• Creating and customizing Master Pages
• Creating page layouts (templates)
• Customizing Site Navigation

One of the best resources which you can start with to understand WCM is MSDN library, you will find a complete reference at the following Posts:
Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites(Part 1 of 3)
Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites(Part 2 of 3)
Customizing and Branding Web Content Management-Enabled SharePoint Sites(Part 3 of 3)

The second issue is User Authentication, regarding this topic I've read many posts from many resources, the complete references which you can read beside MSDN are two posts; one of them from Andrew Connell, published in December 2006:
How To: Configure Publishing Site With Dual Authentication Providers And Anonymous Access

The other post from Dan Attis, Published Thursday, March 01, 2007
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Forms Based Authentication FBA Walkthrough (Part1)
Office SharePoint Server 2007 Forms Based Authentication FBA Walkthrough (Part 2)

If you go through previous two walkthroughs, you will cover most of what you need to build such publishing portal, except the two problems that Mr. Attis has mentioned in his post regarding My Site search in Forms Based Authentication (FBA), and applying best practice on My Site host which will require multiple sign in through navigating from site collection to My Site, which we all hope to get a solution for them soon.

You may find some articles elsewhere, but the most useful I got are these previous posts, also you may ask how could we import user profiles from the SQL Membership DB to SharePoint, and many questions. but I believe that at this point we can build a powerful portal if we ignore or getting over the previous issues.

A good list for helpful resources at the following link: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/MossWcmResources.aspx