After much online research and getting close to what I am looking for by hacking it together (ie. modifying templates and other files, exactly what every expert out there appears to advise against in terms of SharePoint customization) I have decided to go ahead and post my issue here to see if anybody has ever had any experience with this.
In essence, I start off with a plain My Sites host. I would like to keep the My Profile and My Content pages, and add a bunch of new content of top on that. For us, simplicity is of utmost importance and so when I created a new Web Part Page and noticed that it added an additional ribbon under the navigation menu, I decided that it had to go. This is what it looks like out of the box:
With ribbon
Notice that at this point I have already made a few modifications, such as removing the My Site link that by default appears all the way to the left of the other options. This sadly was accomplished in a very brute-force way.
Now, here is the ribbon-free navigation bar, which is just what I want to be able to design without making system changes that I will regret in the future (and that may be easily overwritten by a CU or hotfix)
Without ribbon
So I guess I should make this clear, I don't want the navigation gone, just customized (ie. no My Site string to the left of my options, no Site Actions drop-down for read-only users) and the Browse/Page ribbon that gets added by default everytime you create a new page, well that one just needs to be gone completely, as shown in the second screenshot.
I have read all about hiding ribbons (which just hides the whole thing, including navigation), customizing ribbons (no success in accomplishing this type of basic navigation after trying them out) and simply don't know what to do anymore.
Maybe I am just taking the wrong approach by modifying something instead of just creating it from scratch, at the end of the day it is nothing but a static navigation bar common to all the pages with the special current user drop-down all the way to the right, then if a user has write permissions, she would also get the Site Actions drop-down under Home, that's it.
Hopefully an answer to this question will help others as well who are looking to simplify their SharePoint My Sites host a bit, as out of the box the number of web components that users are presented with might be just a little too overwhelming for your everyday employee, at least in the industry that we operate in.
Anyway, thank you kindly in advance, I look forward to your replies. Do let me know if there is something that is not entirely clear from my explanation :)
If you take away user's Create Personal Site permission (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262500.aspx) in your User Profile, the "My Site" link will go away.
Related
I have a question about Ultimate Special Offers plugin. Has anybody used it?
The problem is that this plugin sets the table with discounts in a special place where it wants. In my case, it shows up under the "add to cart" button. But I want it to appear above the button. How can I regulate the place where the table shows up?
You have two choices. One is to dig into your theme and move the table yourself. If you right-click the element displaying the table while having your browser console open, you will spot where it is in the HTML that makes up your page. Now click the Add to cart button, and see where it is. Memorize the name of the button, and now look for that in your product.liquid page. Chances are, the plugin itself has some liquid, so you can cut it out of the page, and move it the before the add to cart button in the liquid.
If all that seems like a mountain to climb, just ask the makers of the plugin to do it for you. It is a simple task for them, and should take them a minute to do. If they choose to ignore you, I would call them out as unreliable, and try a different plugin, from a company that will help you with your simple task.
Per user feedback, I am opening a new question for this topic.
So I am currently using Struts-Menu to handle my menu needs for my Struts 2 J2EE application. It is not necessarily a package I wish to work with I have found by playing around with it. So what are some alternatives to this package? I immediately flocked to Struts-Menu because I saw a fair amount of web search traffic pointing to it, including those who use Struts2. What I am worried about is difficulty in the future of making it work with other packages, given its 2007 last update and the extra tap dance I had do to make it work with my configuration. It seems too fragile at this point for my taste.
I have several different menus in my app, but the one I am specifically addressing at the present is like this ... The top level menu drops down upon mouse hover over it. The submenus expand horizontally upon mouse hover. Exactly one menu item can be selected as no radio buttons or check boxes are contained in the menu. This particular menu does not require db access to populate its children. It works sort of like Velocity CoolMenus4 from the Struts-Menu demos.
I've never used struts-menu, but it looks like overkill to me.
I would recommend that you locate a menu that you like and then write a tag file to handle outputting it in your view layer. To me, that's a lot easier than using a framework or library just to output a menu. Plus, its specific to the actual menu you want to use. Your tag can handle doing security checks to ensure that the user only sees what they have permission to access, etc.
I'm using a standard link list web part. What I want to achieve is before my users click on the link a pop-up javascript warning box will display, stating that they are leaving the domain. In regular anchor tag I would preceed the URL with javascript:ShowWarning('http://www.youtube.com');.
I've search the AllLinks table in the database but did not find the links was looking for.
Where or how are these stored?
Thanks,
Risho
Firstly, editing the SharePoint database directly is a really bad idea. You shouldn't do it unless you really, really know what you are doing, and even then you will probably break the system.
Secondly, any change made in the data will be what shows up in the editor, and I don't think the editor supports links that don't start with "http://".
A better approach is to use jquery to add the popup behaviour to the links when the page is loaded.
So I'm using Web Part Connections to filter through a couple of lists. It all works perfectly, except that, by default, the filter shows all of the content. If you select one of the options, it filters the list and that is all dandy. But I need to figure out how to let the users see all of the items again, and I can't seem to find a way to display an "all" radio button just above (or below) the rest of the options. Anyone has any clue how to do this?
Thanks!
-V
The OOTB filter web parts are very limited and this is one blindingly obvious example. You may want to look at 3rd party or Codeplex ones for better features.
Similar to xOn's answer what I've done in the past is to add a Content Editor Web Part to the page with a hyperlink called "Reset Filter" that just links back to the page - this reloads the page and removes the filter.
IIRC, choosing a view (right hand side of toolbar) will remove the filter. Not the most intuitive thing, but that's sharepoint for you.
My Google analytics shows the second most used keyword to access my site is the url of the site. This doesn't particularly surprise me, but I wondered if any of you have tried educating your users out of this (i.e. detecting search term from referrer and showing a popin encouraging them to create bookmarks etc.) or is it just a waste of effort or likely to annoy.
UPDATE
I was watching someone the other day and discovered one possible reason why people do this. If you try clicking in the address bar and click twice instead of once, then type your url, you get a big mess. Far easier to type into the nice empty google search box (which is also selected by default). So basically you have the choice between:
Type > Enter > Click
or
BadClick > Type > Enter > "Bugger!" > Click > Type > Enter
Similarly, Microsoft noted long ago that many people just type search queries into the address bar. If there are essentially between two and four unlabeled text boxes on a browser window (address bar, search box, maybe Google start page, toolbars, etc.) don't expect the user to find the right one when they should.
As long as they end up where they wanted to they couldn't care less.
Google Chrome did the right thing imho by merging at least the search and the address bar again.
for most people, google is the internet.
Focus your efforts somewhere else, like providing good contents. It does not matter how they get there.
Good luck :) Most of internet users may even not realize if the address bar gets removed from their browser. Typing a URL is far too technical.
I'm not sure anything can be done. Users are known to be extremely stubborn in their habits.
One my fellow googles for the login page of his online-banking system, being too lazy to type it in or bookmark it. That scares me a lot. It only takes for someone to manipulate search results even for a day or so to hijack the credentials.
I suggest you ignore the matter. With luck, if they google enough for your site, then google will start to show the name of your site in suggestions as your type which is rather nice.
I've tried to encourage the use of a browser at work to access the data I put on the company intranet. It's proving difficult — they would much rather open My Computer and drill down through many levels of folders, while muttering 'Where was that file? What was it called again?'
I prefer the idea of web pages on an intranet site, with images, hyperlinks, etc, but I have to be careful not to use the term 'browser' since people don't really know what it means. For example, I demonstrated the site to one colleague by telling her to start 'Internet Explorer', then I typed the URL, rather than explain it to her. When the web page opened, she said 'Oh wow, what program is this?'
I've gone to some trouble to use 'friendly URLs' — no complex query strings, but it was probably a waste of time. I'm sure no-one types them in and uses bookmarks/favorites instead.
If the address bar disappeared, it wouldn't be missed by the majority of Internet users, and there's a Google/Yahoo/whatever search tool in the corner of each page.