Missing UI Settings in the Object Model

Houston, we’ve got a problem.  It seems that there are quite a few settings in the ShaerPoint UI that are not supported in the Object Model.  Just yesterday, Sean Skinner discovered that when creating WSS sites programmatically the options to enable the navigation menus were missing.  A few weeks back, a client sent me an email asking how the advanced email settings in lists could be set during site provisioning.  Oops, those are missing from the OM, too.

 

This is not good.  Just how many of these critical settings are unavailable to developers?  It’s one thing to have undocumented features – we’ve come to expect that – but crucial parameters missing entirely?  Can anyone explain why a complete UI page’s settings (\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\EmailSettings.aspx) are MIA from the OM? 

 

 

If anyone has any ideas how these settings are applied (it would be really evil of me to suspect a sneaky INSERT statement directly into the database, wouldn’t it?), please share.  We’d all love to know (anyone on the product team listening?).