My First SharePoint 2010 Public Site Launched!

ms.gov | The Official State Website of Mississippi

The new state website for Mississippi is finally live! ms.gov is the first SharePoint site I have worked on since 2006 that is not hidden behind a firewall and it was a ton of work but it is now up and available for all to see! Through Mississippi Interactive (subsidiary of NIC), my day job is to design and build web sites and applications for the state of Mississippi. The new portal is the first redesign of Mississippi’s portal in over ten years and was a major effort by myself and everyone at Mississippi Interactive.

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!

UPDATE: SharePoint 2010, IE 7, and JQuery Issues

This is an update to an earlier post about issues with the style library, IE 7, javascript, REST interface, and anonymous access (yea, it was a lot of stuff). Here is what we have learned:

• 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!!!! I designed this little guy over the New Years holiday (holiday? HA!).

Faking Reusable Content Lists in SharePoint 2010

In my last post I was complaining about how I can’t get the reusable content lists to work right in SharePoint 2010. No matter what I do, or on what page in my site, if I add a reusable html item, the code is displayed rather than being rendered by the browser. After having to manually add side navigation to dozens of pages I said “truck this, there’s gotta be an easier way-mothertrucking Sharepoint!&*” (yea, i’m a dork). We have a folder that we created in Designer at the root of our site collection called “snippets”. We (by “we” I mean myself and my programmer partner in web crime, Jesse Kyzar) use this folder to store small bits of code that we use on the site. I created a blank html page, stripped out everything in it and just added the side nav code. I then added a content editor web part to the side column on one of my site pages and I connected the webpart to pull the html snippet file. Works perfectly. It takes a few extra steps to add and configure the CEWP on each page but it is a lot faster to add the CEWP’s and then update one file rather than worry about having to update dozens of pages if my nav content changes.

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.

 

UPDATE 6/04/2012: Thanks to reader Aneville for cluing me in on why it was not working. Apparently I had a brain fart and was putting my html in the visual editor instead of the raw html dialog. When I add the content directly in to the html dialog it all works perfectly. I was seriously over thinking this and made something simple way to complicated. Thanks Aneville and everyone else who responded!!!