ms.gov | The Official State Website of Mississippi

The site is built with SharePoint 2010 and has quite a bit of JQuery going on to enhance the UI (thanks to our developer and my web slinging counterpart, Jesse Kyzar, for creating all the JQuery and web service grooviness!). This release is our “beta” and we will be adding more features and functionality over the coming months. I will start posting some insights into how we developed certain pieces as time allows (we are very busy with a full project queue!).

Ok, enough bragging, go see the site!

• If you have publishing turned on, you have to make double triple dog sure that your files are PUBLISHED when you push to test, uat, prod, whatever. If anything is in draft mode and you have anonymous access turned on user will get a login screen. We thought there was an issue with the Style Library and anonymous access but it was just files in draft mode causing the problem. You can check for draft files and publish them by using Site Actions > Manage Content and Structure
• If you are using the REST interface with javascript it won’t work once you turn on anonymous access. You will have to redo your code or find a different solution-our programmer is busy right this second redoing all the beautiful code he wrote because we had no idea it didn’t flippin work when anonymous access was turned on We tried everything we could to make it work-we reached out to all the SharePoint pros at our company, on the web, even called SharePoint 911 (why is it whenever I call SharePoint 911 I have an issue that is impossible to fix??). So, in short, wanna use the REST interface? Don’t use javascript to query your lists, write a custom service instead.
• I think the last issue was IE7 not liking Jquery. Our programmer had to rewrite his code a bit to make it play nice iwth IE 7-I’ll get him to tell me exactly what he did so I can let you guys know

We are sooo close to launching the new ms.gov, just a few more days!!!! It’s not a SharePoint site, but I did design/build this little guy over the New Years holiday (holiday? HA!).

If anyone figures out why the reusable content list doesn’t work the way it used to please share. Until then I’m gonna do my method and just pretend the reusable content list doesn’t exist.

We are using JQuery and REST to pull data from SP lists into display pages. This works great on newer browsers and signed in with Contributor and above access. The minute we sign in with a test user with read only access the style library starts bombing out and half the files within it serve and the other half don’t. If I give the test users contribute access to the style library the issues go away. Unfortunately, once we go to production and turn on anonymous access, I can no longer do this as no users with anonymous access can be given contribute access to any lists, or so says what I have read about SharePoint.

We found a few blog posts that might help us, as we are not the only ones with issues with anonymous access and the style library flaking out. Our developer has the fix for IE 7-I am hoping once that is implemented the site will at least all display in IE 7.

Anyone else have issues with anonymous access and the style library? Any ideas, tips, input would be greatly appreciated. And of course, once we figure out how to overcome all these issues I will post the solutions here, as I have found after all these years if I am having a SharePoint issue, a lot of other folks are too.

Happy SharePointing and Merry Christmas!

My next frustration is with text filters. I followed a tutorial by Laura Rogers for connecting a text filter and creating a query string so that you don’t have to use a precise term to search your list. This works great. What doesn’t work great is that once you attach the text filter to your data view, by default it shows no items. I want to show all items and then allow users to filter if they want to. Again, off to Google, and still no answer.

My newest frustration is the default mobile view SharePoint 2010 provides-complete crap. So off to Google to find the code to add to the web.config file to turn this default behavior off (and much thanks to my director of development for dropping everything and getting this fixed for me;) So now my site looks adorable and tiny on the iPhone, but no where near optimized for mobile. Anyone have any tips or success in making SharePoint 2010 play nice on mobile devices?

That’s enough ranting. January 17 we will be launching the state site I have been working on and unlike all the work I used to do at my last job, it won’t be hidden behind a firewall, so everyone will get to see it

What I wanted to do is to simply remove the default hover styling from the menu items and apply my own. I was finally able to change the hover states with this code:

/* Site Actions Menu Items: changes the hover background of menu items */
div.ms-MenuUIPopupScreen div.ms-MenuUIPopupInner ul.ms-MenuUIUL div.ms-MenuUIULItemHover
{
border-color:#274E61;
background-image:none;
background-color:#F7E6D7;
}

It is easier to change the Site Actions menu button since it displays on screen without JavaScript. I used the following code:

/* Site Actions Menu button: change hover background of Site Actions button */
.ms-siteactionsmenuhover{
border-color:#274E61 !important;
background-image:none !important;
background-color:#478eaf !important;

}

/* Site Actions Menu Button: removes the border from the button in the off state */
.ms-siteactionsmenu {
border-color:none !important; 
}

All of these code changes produced this:

NOTE: The code above will change the hover state for not only the Site Actions menu items, but also the Welcome menu items and the list item drop menu items.

Make a copy of the v4.master
Open the v4.master in Designer and do a save as. Save the new file as something different, such as custom.master, and then open it in Designer. Make sure the file is checked out before you start editing it.

Create a custom css file
Create a new css file and save it to a location that makes sense to you. You can save it to the Styles library, or on the server in the 14 hive, or anywhere that is accessible.

Create a changes.txt file
Use this file to record changes made to the masterpage as well as to paste in any controls that have been removed from the masterpage.

Link to the new css file in your copy of the masterpage:
Paste the following code into the HEAD of the masterpage and change the link to refer to your custom css file:

<!-- custom css -->
<SharePoint:CssRegistration name="http://spimages.stei.com/sp2010/styles_senet03.css" After="corev4.css" runat="server"/>

Apply your custom masterpage to a site

Right-click on the new masterpage and select Set as Default Masterpage. You will only be able to preview fully your masterpage changes if the custom masterpage is applied to a site. Make sure that after each change you save the masterpage, check it in and then approve it. Make sure to check the file out before editing it again.

Now you can start altering the masterpage and overriding the css.

1: make sure you have a link to JQuery in your master page in the HEAD:

<script src="'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js'></script>  

2: add a content editor web part to the page you wish to alter

3: use the css() method to target any html tag, css class or id
EXAMPLE:
Say you want to hide the quicklaunch on a page. Use the IE Developer tools to inspect the page and find the outer wrapper for the quicklaunch (.ms-quicklaunchouter). Now add the following code to your content editor web part in code view:

<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.ms-quicklaunchouter').css('display','none');
});

</script>

The area where the .ms-quicklaunchouter is displaying is where you would reference any html tag, ID, or class. ‘Display‘ is where you reference the property, and ‘none‘ is where you reference the value. With this one method you can override pretty much anything on your site.

If you want to override a style across your site collection, create a functions.css file, link it to your masterpage under the initial JQuery link, and put all of your functions there.