The last couple of weeks have been crazy busy for me. Mainly due to getting more requests from users that wanted new features implemented and content deployed. I was so freakin’ busy I hadn’t even had time to check any of my Google Reader feeds for the past 2 weeks! I thought I’d try to catch up with my blogging by posting some of the SharePoint lessons I’ve learned over the past couple of weeks.
InfoPath forms
- They’re OK, easy to use and easy to implement.
- Having all your forms depend on Forms Services is a pain (my end users don’t have the InfoPath clients installed).
- Can’t save to computer, can’t email.
- Good for short and sweet transactional forms.
- Not good for forms that might take a few sittings to finish like the ones from HR *cough* performance appraisals *cough* .
- XHTML rendering is pretty cool.
- XHTML rendering puts a big dent on browser rendering performance.
MasterPages
- Are not my friends.
- For some reason, if you’re using SharePoint as a collaboration tool there are lots of little quirks if you use anything other than default.master.
- Some examples: Vertical picture libraries, layouts aren’t always cross-browser compatible, stuff moves on hover when it shouldn’t.
- It’s much easier to use the default.master and either create your own theme or do what I did and just use a custom CSS file.
CSS Customizations
- Not so hard to do, I was able to change every style used for default.master in 2.5 days.
- Use the IE Developer Toolbar!
- Do not change any of the styles in core.css
- Make a copy of core.css and edit the copied one.
- On the MasterPage settings page, use the CSS override feature to apply your custom CSS so you can always revert back to the original if you need to.
SharePoint Designer
- Oh lordy, I think this software is worse than FrontPage sometimes.
- Great tool for customizing SharePoint pages and content data.
- The Data View web part is awesome!
- Damn thing crashes every half hour.
- Crashes every time there’s bad HTML that it can render in design view.
- I can’t seem to get undo to work on any SharePoint pages after saving it. Works fine for CSS files.
- It gets really confused sometimes and can’t figure out if a file is checked-in or out.
- Sometimes I’ll have to go into the MOSS content management to check-in documents in order to check them out in SharePoint Designer.
- It gets really confused if you change the welcome page on your publishing portal and then rename the file in SharePoint Designer.
- I haven’t found any fixes or workarounds for this yet – I’m basically screwed and can’t reuse names that have already been used like default.aspx.
Custom Default.aspx Pages
- For publishing portals, you can’t just replace default.aspx with your custom code.
- From the Top Level Site > Site Actions > Site Settings > Look and Feel > Welcome Page > Change the path to your custom page.
Ajax for SharePoint
- Seems easy enough.
- Not so easy, but I only spent almost a day on trying to use the ASP.net Ajax control toolkit.
- Instead I went for some Moo.fx and MooTools.
Now to catch up on some reading…
The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife 
Thank you for your post. I am curious, how were you able to use mootools with SharePoint. I would appreciate some details. Thanks.
You’re very welcome! I’ve only used the Accordion script for custom navigations. Haven’t had a chance to try any of the other scripts yet though. I’ll post some screenshots in the next couple of days of what I had done.
I’m interested in how you managed to attach the JS files to SharePoint. Did you have to do these at a site level or on the server?
I actually just uploaded the javascript file to a folder within the portal and had the javascript reference pointed at that location. I’ve been meaning to do a write up on that, hopefully I can find some time next week.
1. With regards to the WebPart, if I click on the link it opens the page in the webpart window, how do I get this to open in a new window?
2. Do you know if it is possible to ‘Grey’ out certain columns in a task list so that only certain users can update them?
3. Do you know if when you create a new item in a task list if SP can automatically create a document workspace for this task with all the information (document library, structure, etc) from the other workspace?
Hey Mthuras,
1. I don’t think there’s any setting for OOB web parts that would enable you to open links in new windows. Perhaps some jQuery would help but I’m not sure.
2. Probably with jQuery.
3. Yes, this can be done with an event receiver.
Wow, interesting Henry. Please take me through that process of greying those columns with jQuery.
For a quick fix (kind of a hack…) I just used a Content Editor Web Part and some jQuery:
$(“a”).click(function(e){
e.preventDefault();
window.open($(this).attr(‘href’));
});
Obviously this will open all anchored hrefs in a new window but you get the idea 🙂
Andrew
To disable an element:
$(‘#myElement’).attr(‘disabled’, ‘disabled’);
to enable
$(‘#myElement’).attr(‘disabled’, ”);
AP
Henry,
Can you post how you got the accordion to work using Mootools in Sharepoint ?
Thanks
Could you possibly help me get mootools and jquery to work on the same master page in sharepoint.