I am kind of new to SharePoint. I am learning it on the go and learned about the concept of pagelayout and publishing features on the site. But I am not really 100% sure what is the difference between a WebPartPage, SitePage and PublishingPage. I kind of know what all these pages be used for, but what I not get is: why do they need to separate all these pages?
I think we can just get a publishing page and have all the feature there including webpart and everything else (with our choice of PageLayout). However I dont see a way to use a pagelayout on a particular SitePage.
Is there any particular reasons for using either one of them? Even though it seems like one of them can serve as all of them?
You should use page layout when ever you know the page structure. For example you are running an online news paper. You want to show the news to the users into three columns. First column is for menu, second column is for news content and third column is for advertisements. Now in your daily usage this layout is common. So you can use this page layout for entering the news. After creating the page layout you can make it as a default to your pages. Page layout is nothing but the structure of a page simply!!
A webpart page does not have a field for content directly on the page like a SitePage has. A Publishing Page is like a SitePage, but requires extra fields for dealing with the publishing extra features.
Using a single layout for all three risks being confused as to why one page does not work the same as another when it has the same layout (the difference would be the underlying features are different.).
I will make a comparison with cars. There are three type of cars, each is better suitable for a certain purpose: tractors for farming, buses for public transport, light cars for private transport. You could use a tractor for all the purposes above but it's not ideal.
"One of them can serve as all of them". This is not true in their current implementation. I'll give you one example: prefer Web part pages against Publishing pages to better control content added by contributors in an intranet. There are many other examples.
Related
I'm new to Liferay and I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to dynamically add or subtract child pages on the fly. From what I've done so far I've only been able to use the Admin Control Panel to add a static amount of child pages to a main page.
My use case is I have a main page that houses all of my graphing charts and then I have a bunch of child pages for each type of graph. The amount of graphs are dynamic depending on the company though so some may have 10 child pages and others may have only three. Is this possible? The only thing I've been able to find is this article on custom navigation, https://liferayinfo.wordpress.com/2012/09/24/liferay-custom-navigation/.
It depends on what you consider "dynamic": If it's literally "on the fly": Yes, there are options to dynamically handle pages - this approach is quite complex. Way too complex for a simple answer on stackoverflow.
But not everything is lost: You might get away with building your own navigation portlet that determines how many (and which) of the child pages that you've statically created get displayed, based on criteria that you know.
When each of your companies (careful: Misleading term - Liferay uses "company" as the technical name for "portal instance") uses a different site, you can also use site templates, or page templates - including this custom navigation portlet.
Also you can always create pages and page hierarchies with Liferay's API. Thorsten Laux's comment already mentions LayoutLocalService. For maintainability: it'll be easier if you use it statically when you create the pages, instead of dynamically when you have the data (there we are again: dynamic use is too complex for this answer).
If it's good enough to hide certain pages: Go with a custom navigation portlet instead of Liferay's own. Depending on the complexity that you're willing to end up with: You can either create your own portlet or utilize a WebContent structure and template to dynamically decide which pages to link and which not to link (which effectively will hide them).
We are using Liferay as a classic CMS meaning that we compose pages using web content articles. There is an issue with Liferay's internal search I could not yet find a proper answer for:
Because web content articles are pretty much only building blocks for pages we don't want the search to show them as distinct items. The user should only get a list of pages that contain their search keywords, including all the articles put onto this page.
At the moment we can see two different approaches and both come with certain problems we could not solve yet:
Idea 1
We modify the journal indexer and try to obtain all URLs of the pages (how?) where the article has been placed on. Then we add them to the document to be indexed. In the search result we then can access the URLs and collect them. In the end we make sure every URL is only shown once.
Idea 2
At some point Liferay renders the entire page before sending it to the browser. If we somehow could put an indexer there, we could index the entire page. We then could limit the search to the special "page documents". Getting the fully rendered page would be the main issue here, because either we would have to run a crawler to frequently trigger this indexing or we would need to find a way to trigger page rendering from within an indexer or something like that.
I have been carrying this problem around for quite a while now and still could not find an idea good enough to spend time trying it out. If anyone of you has some input on those two ideas or maybe an entirely different approach, I would be extremely grateful.
I'll just answer myself, because by now we found a suitable solution to solve our problem:
In addition to the default search portlet there is also a "Web Content Search Portlet" shipped with Liferay. It seems to have been part of Liferay for quite a while now, but it's somewhat hard to find, because there is hardly any documentation for it (I only found the Liferay wiki page, which isn't really anything at all). It searches only within web content articles and shows links to the pages rather than just a link an isolated view of the article. It has much less configuration options than the default search portlet, however. Pretty much all it allows to change is whether articles actually have to be placed on at least one page to show up in the results.
So there is no need for any kind of custom indexer or any other "hack"...all we need to do is use the correct portlet. We will only need to write a hook that changes the appearance of the result page.
What you ask is interesting but your ideas are on the wrong direction.
Specially idea 2 it's particulary wrong because you cannot do indexing work meanwhile a page is rendered. Think about performace only.
In Liferay pages and assets are not directly linked: pages have portlets and portlets display assets (web content and more).
Liferay indexing refers and scans assets content, not refers the display result of the assets. Think about permission: the same page can display different contents depends on the user who looks.
bye
One of my colleague left on vacation and left me with an Orchard project to work on.
I never worked with Orchard, so please excuse my ignorance and my possibly stupid questions.
I come to you for general advice on how to implement and structure the content of my site, as my research didn't give me the answers I'm looking for.
Here are the requirements:
The site must be divided into sections (section A, section A-1, section A-2, section B, etc...)
The navigation of the site must be based on the sections, each navigation item must also contain an image
Each section has a separate page with roughly 4 types of content that must be displayed:
Title of the page
Articles associated with this section, which represent the main content
FAQ content associated with the section which should be displayed in a specific zone
Miscellaneous content associated with the section which should also be displayed in a specific zone
I'm struggling at nearly every aspect of the requirements...
We started building a taxonomy, with as many terms as we have sections, allowing us to build the hierarchy we want, which is perfect. But this had 2 downsides:
The built-in taxonomy-based navigation is static, so the only thing displayed is the term, and we couldn't find a way to change it so the user would be able to add an image to the taxonomy term.
The generated pages based on the taxonomy display every content item based on the current term, that is, the articles, but also the FAQ content and the miscellaneous content, all in the Content zone.
Is there any way to work around these issues by using the built-in taxonomy? Or will I have to build content types from scratch in order to achieve what I'm trying?
The solution my colleague came up with was to add a layer for each section, and add in this layer 3 widgets, one for each specific content (title, FAQ, misc) in different zones. But I don't think this will me maintainable, as we currently have 4 main sections, each with 4-5 subsections, so that's rougly 60 layers, which will be a nightmare for the client to maintain.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated, I'm kind of lost.
Thanks in advance,
Mickaël
Taxonomies was a good start, but now you need to study projections. You'll be able to set-up filters about what you display.
For adding an image to your terms, one way to do it is to add a media library picker field to the type that was created for your taxonomy.
I'm a MOSS 2007 newbie and am trying to find out where a view is used.
I have a larger list and i want to have two different views into that list. I've inherited the site collection, and currently there are three views, with two of them named almost identically. Now i'd like to find out if i can safely remove one of those views.
So the question is: Is there a way to find out all references to a view?
I'll provide additional information gladly!
"First part of my problem is that i'd like to find out which view this web part is using."
"Second part is that i have a set of views made from a list, and i should find out if some web part is using some of those views"
A Web Part does not use a view directly. The current view of the web part is based upon a view, but if you change or delete the view, the web part still displays your list/library as before. Thus, if you delete your views, all web parts will still continue to function.
What you should probably do is compare your views (which fields are displayed, filtering, sorting, grouping, etc.) with each other and also with the view inside your web part. That way, you'll know which view was used before.
What could happen is that you break links to your view page. This is, if on some other page there is a direct link to your view.
What are you trying to do exactly? To get all the views of a specific list, use SPList.Views and load them in the SPViewCollection.
I'm just tasked by my boss to create a Sharepoint solution for the scenerio below.
(I'm a total newbie to Sharepoint. So please forgive me if i use the terminology wrong)
The portal should open in a custom look than the default Sharepoint design and it should have links to the products. Every product page should have different look and feel but have same types of content. For example every product should have Published Materials list but with different set of content.
So, an example of the desired map is like this:
/Home
-Latest News
-Core Team List
-Products
-Product 1
-Product 2
-Product 3
I found Sharepoint a whole new and strange world. I thought i'm good at learning, until i met Sharepoint. Everything seems very detailed and i'm living difficulties in finding useful information quickly. Because i have no Sharepoint background and i don't event know what i'm lookin' for.
Could you please help me by telling me how can i accomplish this or even just telling me the name of "thing" that i'm trying to accomplish.
Thank you in advance.
PS. Oh, by the way, I learned the word Branding in my search for the holy grail. I don't even know that the word fits or not...
I did try the method you post on other page (Restaurant review site in SharePoint) but unfortunately i couldn't succeed. I stucked at choosing what type of content type in the "Create Content Type" page at first and then tried some parent types but i couldn't get it show up in Sharepoint Designer 2007's New Sharepoint Content "Publishing Page" dialog.
So i tried something else.
At my homepage created a new Document Library of type "Web Part Page" called "Products". It created me a some sort of list whose all items are web pages. At this point i felt that i'm near to accomplish something at last.
Here are some questions i've collected: :)
I add two Announcements web part to different "Products" pages. When I add a new announcement to the list from one product page, it shows up in the other one too! How can I make their content only visible in page that the content created on?
*[Theming is a recurring theme in my posts]* Is it possible to change the view of each Product page at this setup so they have different design and color?
Thanks.
Check out the links I posted in the answer to this question for some links to SharePoint 101 tutorials online:
Restaurant review site in SharePoint
Given you're looking for 'branding' that will mean a custom Master Page. A Master Page is what will determine the overall layout of your SharePoint Web Application's pages. After creating a standard SharePoint application, connect with SharePoint Designer and play with that Master Page for a while until you get the hang of it.
In modifying or creating custom Master Pages, it is important to take note of all the controls (special ASP.NET server-side tags) in particular Content Place Holders; if you create your own Master Page and these are missing you're in a world of uninformative-error-message hurt.
You're going to want to create Lists ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointtechnology/HA011199881033.aspx ) to represent 'News' and 'Products'... for Products you may even want to create a Content Type.
Once you create 'News' and 'Products' lists, to see those lists of Products you'll want to make views and use List View Web Parts ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100240521033.aspx ) to include those views in Pages... but at the subject of Web Parts this is probably getting a bit overwhelming so I'll stop here. Comment me if you'd like more.
Addendum
"Is is possible to show only categories of a document library in home page and documents of the selected category in another page?"
-> Yes, and there are several ways. I'd suggest you look into either defining a View for that list which filters based on the category field, then add List View Web Parts to your home page, or writing custom XSLT for the Content Query Web Part, and then add it to your home page. Writing the XSLT for he Content Query web part is a little more difficult, but using the List View has it's short comings in being not-as-configurable, much like this guy is finding out: No-code solution for calendar view of SharePoint news items
"But how can i change a list item to show its details as a whole new page with its own web parts and theme?"
-> Here's the kicker; in SharePoint, each Site you create has a special list for Pages, and each Page actually belongs to a Content Type.
So you can take any content type and turn it into a page; all you have to do is create a Page Layout for it, and add that Content Type to the list.
(So, an example. This is purely speculative; I'm not saying do this specifically, and you probably can't do it exactly as I describe it as I'm oversimplifying a little)
You create a Content Type 'Product', but you also decide 'Category' should be a Content Type too. So you create a content type for 'Catagory', and you give it a lookup column, which refers to items in the 'Product' List. You specify that the lookup can contain multiple items.
Now you want a Page where people can see a category, and all the Products which belong to it. You create a 'Page Layout' (an aspx file) for the 'Catagory' Content Type. In the Page Layout aspx file you can include web controls which render the Catagory's fields, such as 'title' and 'description' and you can probably even add one to render the 'Products' lookup field. (maybe you'll have to code it yourself)
I hope I haven't lost you.
Now that you've created a Page Layout for 'Catagory' you can add 'Catagory' to the Pages list/library and then create pages which represent Catagories, and when people edit those pages, they will also edit the Catagory.
More Addendum
If "Announcements" is a list, the web part you added was a list view web part, and so it just shows the contents of the list (which is independent of the product pages)
You'll want o specify filters of your view. I dunno if you can specify unique filters on the web part... but you can try :)
You might want to consider looking into The Content Query Web Part.
I don't fully understand your second question, but I get the feeling the answer is yes... what do you mean by "view"? You gotta be careful with the lingo; do you mean the Page Layout? or the List View Web Part? or the List View? or the Master Page? ...
you HAVE to check out Heather Solomon. She is the shiznat when it comes to sharepoint branding.
A good start would be using Sharepoint Designer.
Use SharePoint Designer to do your CSS work, particularly in discovering the CSS rules in play. DO NOT publish the finished work from SD; if you do, future Windows Updates may wipe out your files. Instead, deploy your customizations as a Feature. In MOSS 2007, you can add a single custom CSS file using Central Admin - this will then be applied AFTER core.CSS at runtime, To the best of my knowledge, this is the only practical way of doing this.
You need to indicate whether you are using WSS or MOSS. With WSS, you can use themes.