New Article: SharePoint Quick Branding

I'm happy to report that an article I wrote for the SDTimes web edition was published recently. The topic of the article is a quick branding technique that uses the "Alternate CSS" capabilities of MOSS. This one isn't for you pro SharePoint designers out there... this is for the folks that want to add some nice branding to their MOSS site as quickly and simply as possible. By using the Alternate CSS and a wide image that includes your company logo, you can accomplish a lot of design with little effort.



SDTimes: Share Pointers: Quick Branding

SharePoint Name.dll ActiveX Fix has been Featurized

My friend Larry Riemann and I have taken my Name.DLL ActiveX Fix and turned it into a deployable Feature / Solution called SPAXO. The nice thing about SPAXO is that it will apply the fix to all pages on your site no matter what master page is applied without you having to add the Javascript code to your master page manually. We accomplish this by using the .Net HTTPModule to inject the Javascript into the page stream automagically. At this point the code is a major Use At Your Own Risk. If you are feeling daring, head over to Codeplex and give it a shot.

CodePlex: SPAXO (SharePoint ActiveX Override)

Started using Twitter

Twitter is an interesting beast, I initially rejected it... but as of a few months ago I started to give it an honest look. While I don't twitter my whole day away like some folks, I do seem to post at least once a day to it. I think its very good for posting topics that are too small or too personal for a typical blog. So, if you want to see my minor rants and personal stories, follow me at http://www.twitter.com/themossman and if you want to stay focused on UI and SharePoint topics of worth (or so I hope) keep reading here at http://blog.drisgill.com/.

New SharePoint tome - just in time for your holiday shopping

I just saw on Amazon that Wrox is putting together a "Microsoft SharePoint 2007 Wrox Box" which contains four of their best selling SharePoint 2007 books. While I doubt many folks will be plunking down the $100 for the book, I am pleased that the contents of my book, "Professional SharePoint 2007 Design" will be included with the likes of some of the best in the biz like Andrew Connell, Heather Solomon, and Shane Young (among many others).

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-SharePoint-2007-Wrox-Box/dp/0470431946/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226210787&sr=8-3

New CodePlex Project: LyteBox for SharePoint

I decided to spend the weekend making an easy to use web part for SharePoint that allows anyone to add the LyteBox Javascript photo gallery to either MOSS 2007 or WSS V3. If you haven’t seen LyteBox before you should check it out, it’s used on many websites these days to create a nice Web 2.0 style photo gallery. In a basic Lytebox implementation you have to manually call out each image in HTML, but with LyteBox for SharePoint the images are pulled in automatically from a SharePoint picture library. I have packaged the whole thing up in such a way that you can use the web part even in many hosted environments because it involves no custom code (no DLL’s or web.config changes need).

In my implementation there are two list templates, one that creates a document library with all of the LyteBox Javascript code and another that creates a picture gallery with some sample photos. Also, there is one Content Editor Web Part that gets placed on your page for loading the LyteBox Javascript, and a Data View Web Part that has been preconfigured with custom XSLT to load all of the photos from the picture library and activates them for LyteBox.

Here are some screenshots of it in action:







The project is currently labeled as 1.0 beta, because I assume there will be some issues.

Download the code from: CodePlex Page for LyteBox for SharePoint

Learn more about the original LyteBox code: http://www.dolem.com/lytebox/

Also, a hat tip to Pam Davis for her post that inspired this project: http://padavis.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/web-20-popup-using-lytebox-with-sharepoint/

TechEd 2009 Moving Back to Single Week Format

For those of you that aren't doing the Twitter thing, I just saw Andew Connell tweet about his happiness in learning that TechEd 2009 will be moving away from the two week, two track setup that they had in 2008. Most of the folks I spoke with at TechEd 2008 were pretty bummed that they had to pick between a Developer week and an IT Professional week. I think this was also hurt by the fact that presenters often had to choose a track to focus on. So hopefully everyone will be excited to hear the news that it will be one combined week again!

More info at the top of this page at Microsoft.com

Extremely helpful hidden web part menu (browse, import, search)

Just when you think you have learned everything there is to know about a certain aspect of SharePoint, someone will casually mention something that you have never seen before. This was the case for me, when Ted Pattison pointed out a well hidden menu that adds some interesting features to the Advanced Web Part Gallery from the SharePoint web UI.

To see it simply bring up the Advanced Web Part Gallery, and click the Browse bar at the top:

I never even realized this was clickable before, but it brings up the ability to Search for web parts or to Import them (the default view is Browse which is the one you are used to). When you switch it to Search, you will see the following:

This allows you to search for web parts, which is nice because sometimes they can hide in the gallery (at least they seem to for me). The other option available is Import, which looks like this:

This one is very useful, especially if you are making repeated changes to a web part and needing to try it out in your site. Rather than go through all the steps of importing into the web part gallery from the site settings menu, you can import the web part one time just to the current page your working on. This simple functionality saved me a bunch of time the other day when I was making changes to the Common View fields of a Content Query Web Part.