Could someone point out the differences between Sharepoint Designer and the new Design Manager within Sharepoint 2013 ? I searched on the web but haven't found a concrete answer.
Thanks !
1) SPD can still be used to edit SharePoint pages, but the visual Design view and Split view were removed so you need to do all your editing in a code view. You can also still use it for the other things you mentioned.
2) Design Manager is free and included with SharePoint Server. It only works on Publishing sites so its not included with Foundation.
3) Its part of the base installation of the product. You don't need to do anything to procure it.
4) Not really. Design manager provides functionality for Importing/Exporting HTML and CSS that can be edited in any Web Design platform. For example Dream Weaver. Since SPD no longer has a WYSIWYG editor there is not real connection between the two.
5) Most of the customization you've already done will be brought across when you do a content database upgrade. I'm sure there will be some things that need to be upgraded after you do the database attach.
Related
I'm new to SharePoint development and design. Someone recommended using SharePoint Designer as a quicker way to have the site have a specific look that is different from the SharePoint Look Book. We want sections of our page to have borders with rounded edges, and specific color headers. I found several contradicting articles about using SharePoint Designer. Do you recommend using it on the latest version of SharePoint online in 2022? Have you had any success, or have you encountered any issues?
I enable scripting on my site. I tried connecting SharePoint Designer 2013 to my SharePoint online site successfully, but would like to know if it's a good idea to move forward with it.
As you can read from here SP Designer is supported on the latest On-Premises version of SharePoint(2019) on the bare minimum. But as you can see it is a product that is steadily heading to it's end-of-support/deprecation lifecycle.
Also, as you can understand, since it's development was halted since the 2013 version, a lot have changed since then, and many of the new features are not even supported by SP Designer.
If your are trying to make modifications to a SharePoint Online site, I would suggest using more modern tools(PowerApps, Power Automate, Modern UI, SPFx etc) and leaving SP Designer to it's way to deprecation.
You can also, update your question in terms of what you are trying to achieve and we could propose you some ideas :)
I'm a developer with 5 years of MCMS development and without a single know how with SharePoint.
I want to use the CMS capabilities of Sharepoint to migrate my applications but I DONT KNOW HOW TO START!!!!!!
In my actual projects i have a Visual Studio solution with all my code, my templates and my usercontrols...
I cannot see how can i do the same thing with Sharepoint :(
I want to customise my site like i did before, i want to create pages based on templates like i did before.
Anyone knows where i can find a walkthrough that explains me that?
Thank U All.
Unfortunately I think you are going to have to learn SharePoint. Even the WCM features are a big topic, and probably the best book is Andrew Connell's "SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development" - I don't think a 2010 version is available yet. The good news is that I think the MCMS product had a big influence on how the SharePoint WCM features were architected, so the underlying principles will be similar.
SharePoint 2010 has a Visual Web Part that will encapsulate a user control which might make the transition easier. Also see my answer to this question about converting an ASP.NET site to SharePoint which might have some relevant information.
Most of the information about converting from MCMS to SharePoint is for the 2007 version of the product. This two-part article on MSDN seems to be the best starting point.
I cannot see how can i do the same thing with Sharepoint :( I want to customise my site like i did before, i want to create pages based on templates like i did before.
Problem is, SharePoint is not MCMS, no matter how Microsoft tries to brand it as its successor.
Creating sites in SharePoint is almost opposite of how things we were done in MCMS were you build from the ground up using ASPX templates, user controls and placeholders. In SharePoint, you'll have to strip out most of the OOB stuff you don't need. The recommended approach to custom development is through web parts, CAML, and the SharePoint APIs.
Pros and cons of editing sharepoint master page in sharepoint designer or visual studio? Which one do you prefer
SharePoint Designer
Pro:
WYSIWYG editing
Very fast turaround Edit/save/test
Con:
No Version control
Cumbersome reuse/deployment
(Download/Upload)
Visual Studio
Pro:
Integration with Source Control
Deployment/Reuse via Feature/Solution framework
Con:
Pure source code editing
Cumbersome Edit/Deploy/Test cycle
SharePoint Designer & Visual Studio
My recommendation is to use SharePoint Designer to develop the master page on your development machine. Then save the MasterPage into a Visual Studio solution for deployment to Test/Production:
Pro:
WYSIWYG editing
Very fast turaround Edit/save/test
Integration with Source Control
Deployment/Reuse via Feature/Solution framework
Con:
You need both tools, but SharePoint designer is free and this is in general the most efficient way of developing for SharePoint. Make what you can using SPD and the Web UI, then save it into a Visual Studio Solution for version control/deployment
For the most part I agree with what Per Jakobsen answered above. ESPECIALLY for SharePoint 2007.
Additional comments on the Pros/Cons of SharePoint Designer 2010:
I have actually had very good experiences with using SharePoint Designer exclusively for most of the "front end" work. Meaning, anything that is not a Server Side Web Part...
Regarding the "Cons" listed above:
Source Control -
Setting up the SharePoint Version Controls for the document libraries that store the web pages you are working on does a fairly decent job of managing Source Control - which is handy when you are doing development work on the Production server. (see below)
Cumbersome reuse/deployment
Not sure what is being referred to here, but I THINK it is in regards to developing code in one place, and then deploying that to a production server.
With permissions set correctly users are not impacted by development work because they will see the pages/code that is checked in, approved and viewable.
While I would normally hesitate to operate on production directly, there are many scenarios with SharePoint that require this - especially if you are editing XSLT data directly, etc. (what comes to mind off the top of my head are references to List or Library GUIDs and other "variables" that will be different between servers)
Cheers!
Although I don't know why, SPD also changes your <%# Register ... %> tags: it strips any leading "~" from the src="~/_controltemplates/..." attribute. You need to manually add them back in before publishing.
I've been brought in as an intern to develop a SharePoint site. My team won't authorize the budget for Visual Studio and I don't have physical or remote access to the SharePoint server (running Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 a.k.a. WSS) on the back-end.
So what exactly can I do? I'm familiar with web technologies like PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. However, since the environment is SharePoint, I'm stumped trying to figure out how much control I have with Microsoft's definition of "Full Control".
If I can write some C#, I'm pretty sure that would be sufficient, but as I said no Visual Studio for me.
Any good ideas of features that people will use on a site built with the limited functionality of WSS and SharePoint Designer with "Full Control"? Can I somehow manipulate the default Web Parts into something cool or useful? Are there Ajax tricks I can do to accomplish something on the back-end?
Thanks in advance, I'm new to StackOverflow and eager to get involved here!
You can actually accomplish a LOT in SharePoint outside of a custom .NET solution. Some recommended learnings are:
JavaScript/jQuery - Know how to interface with a WebService using jQuery. SharePoint exposes a number of very useful WebServices in the /_vti_bin directory. Click here for a list: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms479390.aspx. For example, I recently built a scrolling slide-show webpart entirely using jQuery and SharePoint's built-in webservices that pulls from a provided picture library.
DataForm Web Parts. Do some searching around on what these are and how they work in SharePoint. The tl;dr of these is that they're databound webparts that are bound to an SPDataSource and then rendered using XSLT to format the bound data. You can work with these in SharePoint designer, completely through the markup of your aspx page.
Do some searching on "customizing sharepoint list forms." The NewForm, DispForm and EditForm of any list or library can be customized to have behaviour or content added to them.
Those are just off the very top of my head...
EDIT:
I forgot to also mention http://www.muhimbi.com/Products/SharePoint-Infuser-%28Free%29.aspx
I've been meaning to check this out, since the concept is sound. I haven't tried it out myself but it will save you a lot of hassle when it comes to adding custom script that encompasses your entire site.
Basically need to use SharePoint (because we promote MS yay!) as a content management system for an internet facing site.
How do I get rid of the default SharePoint look and feel and make it look like however I want it to?
I know the process involves creating a new masterpage with SharePoint Designer. However I prefer to code webpages rather than use a visual editor. Is this possible? Do I need knowledge of .NET?
Just check out ferrari.com for a very well made redesign of a SharePoint site.
Heather Solomon's Branding SharePoint series would be a good place to start. There's a lot you can do just with CSS, JS and HTML, but the most complete solutions (like Ferrari) require some pretty extensive customization with .NET and other SharePoint development techniques (features and delegate controls, in particular).
Your branding effort will be a lot easier if you only need to heavily brand the public-facing "publishing pages", from which you can remove most of the SharePoint-specific elements that make branding difficult.
Also, SharePoint Designer has a source view if you don't like the visual editor.
Yes it is possible to make it look like however you want it to (as you've seen from the Ferrari site). However to create that sort of site takes a lot of work.
Microsoft recommend the use of SharePoint Designer for 'designing' pages and layouts. However changing their behaviour almost always needs Visual Studio and development in .NET. You can largely avoid SharePoint Designer (which may worth considering as it can be a PITA) with an open source tool such as SPVisualDev. Use this with WSPBuilder for packaging your solutions (and avoid VSeWSS where possible).
Considering it sounds like you're just getting started, be aware this is a big topic with a reasonable learning curve. Read a good book on the topic such as Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 by Andrew Connell. It takes you through most things you will encounter from the ground up.
I'm working my way through Real World Branding by Andrew Connell at the moment. It seems like a good demonstration, with code.
Plus the Heather Solomon articles as suggested by dahlbyk are always informative.
Just changing the theme, or creating a custom theme for the site, can go a long way towards making SharePoint look a lot better. It's also a lot less intensive then changing the master pages.
How to create a theme
How to deploy a theme
Example customization you can do with just CSS
Does the EULA allow you to disguise the fact that it's MS software?
Remember, you didn't buy the software, you're just paying for the privilege of using it.