With now about 30 schools in the Northern Territory looking seriously at using SharePoint 2010 for their websites (and I suspect many more to come when they find out how easy it is) I have been furiously searching the web looking for answers to things I don't know - which means a lot of searching...

...and of course there are some gems out there.

Thanks to Jane W for inspiring this post.

This post focuses on just three areas - basic infopath forms, modifying cascading style sheets to hide bits of SharePoint that you don't want folks to see and modifying the masterpage.

From an enterprise perspective this is potentially a little dangerous, so if your SharePoint administrator asks you to "step away from the keyboard", it is probably best just to do so. Why? In an enterprise environment, we want consistency, we want forms to follow the same workflow, things to look the same and so on.

For a school, which is a site collection, the school site collection owners have greater freedom to implement branding that reflects the character of their school - hopefully without compromising usability.

Stylesheets

The easiest way to do this is to create a cascading style sheet which runs after the standard style sheets that come with SharePoint are run.

One of the problems is knowing what the pesky little names are that SharePoint assigns to styles.

http://erikswenson.blogspot.com/2010/01/sharepoint-2010-base-css-classes.html This post goes through most of the common styles used on SharePoint 2010. A simple thing to do is to set the display to none to hide the element. Another thing is to use !important at the end of the style to override any base style settings by SharePoint. Those two things are the key to hiding or overriding styles.

example
body #s4-ribbonrow {display:none;}
.s4-ca {margin-left: 35px;background: transparent;overflow:hidden!important;}
 

If you would like to remove the "Recently Modified" from Quick Launch - which is the left hand column of links in SharePoint pages - add the following to your custom stylesheet.

.s4-recentchanges { DISPLAY:none; } 

Master Pages

Your site will need to be a publishing site so that you can have access to the masterpage area of the site.

Changing the masterpage is a little harder and I would recommend downloading and applying one of the stripped down masterpages if you are thinking of making radical changes to the way SharePoint looks and feels.

There are a couple of blog examples where you can get hold of these base master pages.

http://blog.sharepointexperience.com/2011/09/09/just-the-essentials-sharepoint-master-pages/

http://startermasterpages.codeplex.com/

Looking for some inspiration? http://www.pinkpetrol.com/blog/2010/06/top-20-examples-of-creative-navigation-within-sharepoint/

InfoPath

InfoPath - quickly changing a list into a form

 

There is a lot more to using infopath and where you have created a form from a SharePoint list, you also need to know how to edit that form and save it back to the server.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/edit-list-forms-using-infopath-2010-in-sharepoint-designer-HA101631624.aspx

Using Explorer View in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint 2010 is leaps and bounds better than any previous version in many ways. However, there are areas where some folks feel a little bit was lost in the translation. One of these areas was the ability to create a view of a document library that actually used Windows Explorer “behind the scenes” to let you perform drag and drop style file manipulation. For SharePoint 2010, the Explorer View was replaced with an icon in the Library toolbar to “Open with Explorer”. This opens your library in a separate window, using the full Windows Explorer.

http://www.thesanitypoint.com/archive/2010/10/20/simulating-explorer-view-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx

Differences in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 - Why you should consider migrating your site.

http://www.rharbridge.com/?page_id=103

This entry was posted on November 8, 2011 at 10:29 AM and has received 518 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.