My customer wants to provide 2 themes for a SharePoint application. Is there a strategy to accomplish this in MOSS 2007?
We want to apply user profile-based theme selection, and maybe even a drop-down to switch modes.
I don't know how extensive you want your re-theming to be. However if it could be CSS-only you could use this approach:
Store the CSS files for the different themes in the Style Library.
Create a list that stores the user and their chosen theme.
Write a feature and custom application page to allow the user to change their theme.
Write a control that does a lookup on the list against the current user and obtains the a reference to the corresponding CSS file in the Style Library. The control would then output the CssRegistration and CssLink controls to the page for this file.
Add this control to the master page so it executes on every page (caching should be added).
I can't see why this wouldn't be supportable by Microsoft as you're only changing CSS.
If you need to do more than that then another option is to write an HTTP module that changes the HTML output. Or of course JavaScript. With these two options you may have supportability issues (it depends on how extensive your changes are).
There is also SPThemes now available on Codeplex from Bjørn Furuknap. Users can choose their own themes and they can be applied at different scopes.
Here are the options that I’ve come up with from research and feedback. Both of which seem mostly infeasible.
Implement major UI layout changes in JavaScript. This would lead to client slowdowns, would be difficult to code, and would be completely unsupported by Microsoft due to the need to reference SharePoint objects that may change with subsequent SharePoint patches.
Provide two parallel themed sites based on the same data, and provide a way to switch between them. This would require that we deploy each site to multiple locations, and would require retooling of any site creation mechanisms in code (since they'd need to target two sites instead of one).
One another thing you can try is to use the Theme Changer and ThemeChangerStaple from codeplex , That is implemented as feature you can use the same code logic to archive what you want with bit of modification, give it as an option for the user using CustomAction.
Related
Is it possible to pass parameters to actions of MODX Revolution's manager in a URL? If it is possible, how to do that? For example, I want to create a direct link to "System Settings" manager page and automatically open "core" namespace and "site" area.
Background:
There are some common sections on the site, which can be duplicated in several places. These sections are more like simple values, rather then blocks of code (let's say, phone numbers, address, some URLs, etc).
I know, that such functionality can be achieved with chunks, but it feels like it would be better to use custom system settings. At least, it would be great to keep end users out of site's templates, chunks, snippets, etc as long as it is possible. But it turned out that customers usually found such things pretty complicated, because it is hard to find them.
MODX Revolution allows developers to create custom widgets. Probably, it is possible to create a widget with a list of links to important areas for site administration. I successfully created an HTML widget with a link to system settings, but, unfortunately, I cannot construct a link to a specific area of them.
Probably, such things can be achieved with Custom Manager Pages, but it looks like it is very hard to create them. I have not much experience with MODX API and never worked with ExtJS.
There is a great extra for MODX Revolution called ClientConfig, that could be used for managing those special system wide settings. Bonus: the access to all system settings could be denied for users with an editor role if ClientConfig is installed.
I am aware of a program called "SharePoint Designer 20xx), and I would like to know if any of you have modified the default master page to make it.. less confusing and more simplistic. Can this be however I want it or is there limitations?
I also found this:
http://www.expertsharepointconsulting.com/images/Blue%20Large.PNG
I would like to implement a design similar to this! If I were to download a "Free sharepoint master page", would this design only work for the main page of SharePoint? as in if I were to go from the newly added masterpage, to a page called "reports", would it be completely different? If so how can I get around this?
You can create customized masterpages whichever way you want. Usually you don't touch the default ones, specially because you can break some system pages with that. Just create new ones from them or from the minimum.master one.
As an example of a Sharepoint Website using a very customized master page I can point you to a publishing website project I was involved for a Portuguese company: http://www.ana.pt/en-US/Pages/Homepage.aspx
It's all Sharepoint 2010...and it is fully customized
You can of course use the same template for all pages, just have to set it on the root site and say that all sub sites inherit from it.
To achieve the level of design changes you see on that web site you have to build new master pages, page layouts, use JS, CSS and user controls (the website uses little to no web parts).
we don't use Sharepoint designer because that would mean the files becoming unghosted, which can be pain sometimes, and sharepoint designer is not a very good tool.
The way we do it is by implementing everything on visual studio and deploying it via WSP packages. This way everything stays ghosted on the file system. You can check an example here:
http://mihirsharepoint.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/creating-custom-master-page-in-visual-studio-and-deploy-it-to-the-sharepoint-site/
this seems to be a bit of an odd requirement, but we have a separate form (not an infopath form) being filled out by people. Now, this form that we have has quite a lot of validations in it. We're currently trying to prevent people from accessing the list where this certain form is saving the data, this is so that they won't bypass the validations we created in the form that we created. Is there a way to be able to do this, one way or another?
Easy fix. Use SharePoint Designer to browse to the list, starting from "All Files". The list has several files in it. You're only interested in NewForm.aspx and EditForm.aspx.
Open these files. Either add JavaScript redirect code directly to the file (near placeholdermain) to point back to AllItems.aspx, or add a Content Query Web Part to add the redirect JavaScript code in that added web part.
Either way, when users go to add/edit items in that list, they will be bounced back to the page that list the items.
This will only work when JavaScript is enabled. Mind you, SP won't work very well with JavaScript off anyway, so people may not disable JS. But for a bullet proof solution, make a Visual Studio feature for the specific list.
Our SharePoint site has a couple of broad groups that use it. In essence they are managers and users. We have different tabs viewable to the different people.
We now have a requirement for Managers to be able to pretend for a while that they are users, and see what users would normally see.
We cannot think of a way of achieving this toggle, what we don't want is for managers to get ALL the tabs that managers and users see, but be able to switch views on demand.
It is not required that users are excluded from manager content if they can guess the url, but equally if they are excluded then that is not a big problem.
We can write code if required, we are just not sure where to start with this!
Edit: There are whole sub-sites and pages of info for both audiences, not simply content on the same page.
Put the manager content and the user content in separate divs. Create a content editor web part, and use javascript to hide the irrelevant div based on the query string. Then link to:
mypage.aspx?page=manager
This worked really well for a similar project I had.
I have a task that I need to perform for a friend as a favor, to modify some forms on a MOSS/Sharepoint site to add some javascript to each form for some SEO tracking purposes.
I've had a little bit of exposure to Sharepoint, but it is mostly by using the Sharepoint Designer 2007 tool.
I am able to navigate to the site, and I can see the content in Sharepoint Designer. However, I am not able to see the forms, and I'm a bit stuck.
Here is an example of a form that I need to modify:
http://www.MY_SITE_GOES_HERE.com/forms/covg_order.aspx
I've read a little online, but I'm stuck. I don't know if these are infopath forms or what. I just need to modify the forms.
Is there a simple answer to this problem? Or a good resource to get up to speed quickly for this task?
I'm not a sharepoint expert, so thank you in advance for answering a simple question.
While hardly the simplest approach, but since this is a developer site, I would recommend creating a DelegateControl to add to your site. Using DelegateControls has several benefits, for example:
the ability to selectively activate and deactivate the controls through features
no need to modify any out-of-the-box files which would break supportability
ability to output different content on a page-by-page basis
You can opt to use one of the DelegateControls of the default master pages if you need to deploy to an existing site based on one of the default site definitions. The AdditionalPageHead is a favorite among developers, as it allows multiple overrides to be active at the same time.
If you want to create your own master pages you can add DelegateControls as you like.
If you want to learn more about DelegateControls you can check out the first issue of Understanding SharePoint Journal (Disclaimer: I wrote that issue). Also, check out the MSDN article on How to customize a Delegate Control.
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you can also check PowerForms which is a silverlight webpart that fully customizes sharepoint forms. You can add business logic in forms using custom assemblies and a lot other advanced tasks. Give it a try, i think it will solve a lot of problems.
http://www.bpc.gr/powerforms
You have a couple of options here:
If you need to add a unique code, like Google analytics you should probably deploy your code to the master page.
In case you need to customize forms for lists you will have to do it with SharePoint designer. In that case you will find EditItem.aspx and NewItem.aspx with SharePoint Designer pages or any other custom page. Open SPD, locate your list, expand it, look for Forms subfolder and you will find all the forms there.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer is now free, as of 1-Apr-2009. It's a good tool, not only for modifying individual pages, but for entire sites.