R – Allow visitors to update certain List programmatically in wss 3.0

This is quite a common misconception - the paranoid amongst us may even thing that MSFT doesn't do much to clear this up as it pushes people along the route of buying SQL Server...

Tin hats away though ...

• When you use the "Basic" install option during MOSS 2007 installation it does install and use SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (see Stand alone installation) and you do have a 4GB limit.

• When you use the "Basic" install option during WSS 3.0 installation it DOES NOT use SQL Express, it uses something called Windows Internal Database and it DOES NOT have a 4GB size limit.

Its hard to find an authoritative reference on this (tin hats again) but this one by Mark Walsh and marked as correct by an MSFT moderator is about the best I can find.

It's possible to provision sites from the object model, but creating entirely customized sites is beyond the scope of a single question. To get you started, you should take a look at the SPWebCollection.Add as well as the SPSiteCollection.Add.

To create a site collection and some subsites into one of your web applications, you could use something like this:

var farm = SPFarm.Local;
var solution = farm.Solutions.GetValue<SPSolution>("YourSolution.wsp");
var application = solution.DeployedWebApplications.First();
var sites = application.Sites;
using(var site = sites.Add("/", "Root Site", "Description", 1033, "YOURTEMPLATE#1", "YOURDOMAIN\SiteCollectionAdmin", "Site Collection Admin", "admin@yourcompany.example")) {

    using(var rootWeb = site.RootWeb) {

        // Code customizing root site goes here

        using (var subSite = rootWeb.Webs.Add("SubSite", "Sub Site", "Description", 1033, "YOURTEMPLATE#2", false, false)) {

            // Code customizing sub site goes here

        }
    }
}