What’s New in the OOTB Master Pages for SP2 of SharePoint

If you live under a rock you may have missed all the news lately about the release of Service Pack 2 for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS) and Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) (more info on SP2 here).

Among the listed updates is this note: “The 2007 Office Suite SP2 has been tested and is supported for Internet Explorer 8”.

I figured I would fire up a VM and compare the OOTB master pages (both source and output) between the pre and post SP2. Here are the results:

• default.master – Source unchanged
• blueband.master – Source gains: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7"> which will help force IE8 to render the page in IE7 mode. Note, if you manually force IE8 to render in IE8 mode the navigation still has issues displaying. For more info, see my previous post about IE8 and SharePoint.

 

• default.master & blueband.master rendered page – They both gain an inline style for the Global Links section:

    <div style="white-space:nowrap;">...</div>

The addition of the meta tag and the style are both good things to have as I usually end up adding both to my master pages. The later helps with the vertical alignment of the Global Links in Firefox. I stole a screenshot of what this style fixes from Heather because I’m too lazy to make one myself:

That’s pretty much all I see on changed on the most basic of tests. I’m sure there is a lot more changed under the covers and on other pages (my test only included default.aspx). Let me know if you find some more.

Using the XML Web Part to show your Twitter feed in SharePoint

I have put together a quick and dirty example of using the XML Web Part to display and style your Twitter RSS feed in a SharePoint page. 100% of the work is done in XSLT, all you have to do is:

• Add an XML Web Part to your page:

 

 

• Then for the XML Link add the RSS feed for your Twitter updates, the link for this can be found on the bottom right of your Twitter home page:

 

• Just right click on the RSS feed and copy and paste the the URL into the XSL Link field of the XML Web Part. (mine is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/15901109.rss)

 

• Next, click the XSL Editor button and paste in the following XSLT code:

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet
     version="1.0"
     xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
     <xsl:output method="html" />
     <xsl:template match="rss/channel">
        <style type="text/css">
            .twit_tweet a {
                font-size: 13px;
                color: #111111;
                width: 400px;
            }
            .twit_date {
                font-size: 12px;
                color: #333333;
                font-style: italic;
            }
            .twit_holder {
                padding-bottom: 15px;
                width: 500px;
            }
        </style>
        <xsl:apply-templates select="item" />
     </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="item">
        <div class="twit_holder">
            <div class="twit_tweet"><a target="_blank" href="{link}"><xsl:value-of select="description" disable-output-escaping="yes"/></a></div>
            <div class="twit_date"><xsl:value-of select="substring-before(pubDate,' +0000')" /></div>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

• After you click OK and Apply your changes you should see your tweets styled in the XML Web Part:

 

• You can adjust the CSS in the XSLT to change the way the tweets look. Also, if this blows up your site, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I haven’t really tested it in production. Have fun!

What you should do when Microsoft pushes the Automatic Update to IE8

Microsoft has finally announced that they will be pushing automatic updates to IE8 for PC’s that are currently running IE6 or IE7 (more info here). This is great news, as I had a very long winded post already typed out (but not published) entitled “IE6 Needs to Die (or why IE8 makes me sad)”. I won’t go into great detail about the post now that I see Microsoft is being proactive with trying to upgrade older Internet Explorers.

I do have a helpful graphic for people that will be seeing the new Update to IE8 welcome screen. If you have any doubts about what to do on this screen follow my expertly crafted graphic instructions:

I know some folks are on intranets that have requirements for older versions of Internet Explorer, but I implore you to consider clicking the button. Here is some info from my unpublished rant:

“Now that IE8 has been released, something official needs to happen with IE6. It needs to reach its end of life… Microsoft should stop supporting it and encourage folks to upgrade. Why do I feel this way? Well, with IE8 and the latest Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Chrome browsers, we as designers can finally strive for true table-less / w3c compliant design with good confidence that almost any modern browser will handle things pretty darn close to the same as its siblings. This is great… EXCEPT when you start to consider the various browser market shares. There are several different sites that provide these statistics and they don’t all agree on actual numbers, but most agree that IE6’s market share is still 18% – 20%! To put this in perspective, Firefox (2 + 3) is about only about 22% – 25%. This means that we as designers still cannot ignore IE6. This would be practically equivalent to ignoring Firefox, and no one would argue this. The amount of effort that goes into supporting non standards compliant browsers like IE6 factored across the globe I bet is quite significant.”

By clicking this button, you are in fact helping propel the interwebs towards a more standards based browser / platform neutral utopia. Do your part for human kind, Al Gore would be proud of you. </End of Rant>