I just got access to the 2010 beta and am playing with it now. I just checked in a bunch of files, all at once! Yeah! Such a simple thing but so a necessary feature! I have to say I’m not really crazy with the overall design, the lists have no lines in them and all the content just looks like it is dumped on the screen….
Batch Check-In!
Ugly floating lists!
Here are the notes I took while at the conference:
Social computing implications (tagging and rating features)
Managed metadata service
I will be in Vegas next week for the SharePoint Conference. I went last year to the one in Seattle and loved it. I will condense my notes from the conference and post the best stuff here.
UPDATE: Wow, that was a long week! Vegas is like another planet-I missed all the green I usually have in NOLA. I am very excited about 2010 and have registered for the trial already (go to the SharePoint 2010 site and click on Try It to register. One note-the nav is in Silverlight and seems slow/buggy…)
Question: what admin software are you guys using? Anyone using any of the following: Quest, ControlPoint or DocAve?
It has been driving me nuts that you have to have a Name column, so you have a link to the files, as well as a Title column, so you know what you are actually clicking on. I found a tutorial for changing a column into a link but it also changed the text of my Title into the link text. So… I copied the code that was generated by that little experiment, grabbed the url that it wrapped, and then added that url around the Title code. Success!
Step By Step:
One thing I have been wanting to do with blog posts is create teaser intros, show x amt of characters of the post followed by a link to read the rest of the post. Sadly, SP does not provide this functionality out of the box. So I Googled the problem and found a site with the solution. The problem is the solution is hard to understand and my eyes glazed over trying to understand what the author was asking me specifically to do. I eventually got the fix to work, and decided that I probably wasn’t the only person who didn’t speak code who might need this solution, so I decided to paraphrase the authors fix in designer-ese… I take ZERO credit for the fix, please visit the author below for the original post:
Original fix/code: http://zabistop.blogspot.com/2009/02/customizing-sharepoint-blog-posts-web.html
Step 1: Open SP Designer
Step 2: Open Blog site in Designer
Step 3: Open default.aspx
Step 4: Click at the very top of the List View Web Part for the posts and then right-click. Select Convert to XSLT Data View:
Step 5: Go into code view and do a find for: ms-postbody. It should bring you to the area of code that you need to swap out. Below is the code that needs to be replaced:
Replace this code...
Replace with this:
with this code...
(aside: I am trying in vain to upload a file that allows you to copy and paste the code, but the crappy WordPress interface wont do it! Can’t add code to the page or the stupid thing tries to execute it, even in code tags! Stupid app!)
The 250 in the last xsl: value snippet is the number of characters of text that is displayed-this number can be whatever you want. You can also change what the “more” link says, maybe to “Read Post” or whatever.
Step 6: Add new xsl template. Add the code below to the top of the page under an existing xsl:template snippet:
Now save and open the page in your browser.
One of the things that as been driving me crazy is the inability to selectively style webparts. On the home page of my company’s intranet, I have several webparts pulling content in, and they all look the same. I primarily wanted to make the announcements web part look different. I tried every hack I could think of to find some kind of unique hook to attach some styling to. I would change the title style and then watch it change ever title on the page. I have been trying to find uses for the data view web part and so I thought, maybe I can use that to pull in the announcements and then style them…
Long story short, it worked. Using the dvwp I was able to pull in the announcements list, set what fields to display, and then individually style the display of those fields.
First, I created a page layout. You can’t add the dvwp to pages directly unless you create a page based off a page layout and then detach that page from the page layout in SPD before you work on it. On the page layout in Sharepoint Designer, I selected a web part zone, clicked on Data View in the toolbar, and then selected Insert Data View. I then pulled the announcements list onto the dvwp area. I clicked on the arrow to the right of the DVWP and the Common Data View Tasks box displayed.
Common Data View Tasks
First, I edited the columns. I removed all but Title and Body. Then I changed the layout to Repeating Form Style. I then set the paging to display items in sets of 4. Under Sort and Groups, I set it to sort by Created, descending.
Now it was time to style the content. First, I removed the word Body that displayed right over the body content. Then I moved the title xsl code to right above the body code. I created two styles, one to handle the title and one for the body. I wrapped the styles around the fields and then cleaned up the display a bit by removing the extra row, hr and br tags.
Wrapping styles around the fields.
Once that was done, I saved the layout, checked it in and then created a new page based off that layout. The dvwp displayed on the page as a webpart. I exported the webpart and then added it to the Web Part Gallery. I went to the intranet home page, put it in edit mode, and then added the webpart to the page.
One note, I tested this on my dev server first and made sure it worked before I tried it on production 
I have a subsite that I wanted to give over to our Documentation group to maintain. It is a publishing site with a custom page layout. I tested the security with a test user account. I gave the test account full control access to the subsite. When signed in as the test user, I could see the Site Actions button, see pages, security, etc. But when I would try to add a page, I got an Access Denied error. I tried it on a different subsite to just see if there was something wrong with that particular site, and I still got the error. After digging and poking around the web, I found a reference to give the user read access to the Master Page gallery. I gave the test user read access to the master page library and then signed back in and voila, it works!
Sometimes SharePoint just doesn’t make sense, with all the hoops you have to jump in to do seemingly simple things. Like add reusable content lists to a page layout. All i want to do is just add the references to two reusable content lists directly into a page layout so they are there when i make my pages. Apparently, to do this requires custom programming, still waiting on the estimate. In the old days, I’d simply add a library item into a Dreamweaver template and call it a day. Bah.
The new corporate intranet I have been working on the past year will launch Friday night (yeah!). One my last of last things to do is to create a favicon. Easy enough. Just create an image 16 by 16 pixels and save it as a gif or png. I then went here: http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ . This site lets you upload the graphic and it generates the .ico files for you. There are standalone programs I have used in the past to create the .ico files, but this one is a website, its free, and it took ten seconds.
Here’s where I had issues. Just where is the “root” for a SharePoint site? I added the files right next to default.aspx-no dice. I added them to the images folder on all the production web servers. Nope. We use an external share for images so i don’t have to store custom images in SharePoint. Once I added the files there and linked them in the header of my masterpage, voila, they show up!!!
Here is what I added to the head of the masterpage:
Favicon links
As for why this worked, and why having the images in the images directory doesnt work-you got me. I have had issues on regular websites getting the favicons to show up, so maybe they are just poorly implemented by browsers. If you are not using an external share for your SharePoint images, I would suggest you ask your admin to set one up. I add the images once, link them once, and that’s that. I don’t have to worry about pushing them from one server to the next and I don’t have to store them in SP libraries.
If anyone knows a better way to do the favicons for those without an images share, please let me know and I will amend the post.
We finally pushed our new intranet from development to production the other day. As I was checking the pages I noticed my theme was not showing up in the Themes list. Doh. Anything in the 12 hive that you added does not push when you go from dev to production. You have to manually move copies to all production servers. In my case, our farm has five production servers, and I have a custom theme, so thats three things I need to copy over to each server:
1: spthemes.xml
2: thumbnail image for theme preview
3: custom theme folder
Beyond that oversight, everything pulled over fine, all of my relative links work, pages are there, masterpage and page layouts pulled, all is good. ;0
As I have mentioned before, my team and I are working on redesigning our corporate intranet in SharePoint. Our programmers are learning .Net and have been getting comfortable coding in it and creating applications. They haven’t really taken the time to figure out how to code within SharePoint though, and this leaves us with a problem. There was a lot of custom code on our old intranet and SharePoint doesn’t have an out-of-the-box solution for everything. My programmer started looking into creating a custom webpart but decided it was a pain and due to time constraints, we came up with an easy solution that works quite well.
He created a .net page with the necessary code for the widget and we pulled the code into the Sharepoint page using the Page Viewer webpart. We currently have two of these on our home page. One randomly loads a different slideshow image that upon clicking the image launches a slideshow in a popup window. The other loads stock quote data that is pulled from a web service.
I’m sure that hard-core programmers and SharePoint developers will weep at this hack, but for a small team with limited resources and time, this works quite well for us and was way easier to implement than a custom webpart. I have also used the page viewer webpart to pull in a Google map. On our old intanet, I was able to add the iframe code that Google Maps generates, but SharePoint seems to hate iframes and wont render them, so the page viewer webpart was a decent workaround here as well.
