Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well

2014-12-102014-12-01 Andy BurnsjQuery, Managed Metadata, NavigationLeave a comment

In SharePoint 2007 and 2010, if you wanted a neat hierarchy of publishing pages, you had two options. Either, you structured your SharePoint site so that you got the navigation you wanted, or you built custom navigation providers. Unfortunately, customers typically want everything to be ‘out of the box’, even if that means some absurd structures just to get the navigation right. Developing custom navigation providers is a really tough sell, but I’ve also seen site structures 7 levels deep to try to avoid this – and a 7 level deep site structure is a really bad idea.

SharePoint 2013 gives us a standard alternative to structural navigation. Instead, we can use ‘Managed Navigation’. This is a Managed Metadata termset that define’s our site’s hierarchy.

That’s great, but there are some problems with this still. Continue reading “Making Managed Metadata Navigation work well” →

Website Bandwidth Usage

2014-09-022014-11-30 Andy Burnsbandwidth, CDN, Coding, Development, jQuery2 Comments

Off topic a little for SharePoint, but we all know the value of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), right? In particular, using services that host commonly used files, like jQuery.js, etc.? This has the advantage that other sites that use that CDN may have already cached that file in your visitor’s browser, but it also reduces the bandwidth used by your site.

Well, I found that my site was spending a lot of bandwidth serving jQuery.

Yup, 10% of my site’s bandwidth was being spent on… serving jQuery. That’s not efficient, so I found this post, which describes how to make the site use a CDN instead. Note that the functions.php file it mentions is the one in your theme.

Hopefully, that’ll reduce the bandwidth used. I also changed the css files for the theme, by minimising them; that should save another 200Mb per month. In total, that should be about a 12% saving on bandwidth.

It’s funny how this all mounts up!

Looking up against Large Lists in Office 365

2013-10-242014-11-30 Andy Burnsautocomplete, JavaScript, jQuery, Large Lists, Office 365, QueryThrottleException, QueryThrottling, SP2013 Development14 Comments

So, I had an issue that I’ve a customer who wanted to have some items look up against a large list. (In fact, it was a large document library). This large list had more than 5000 items. This is a little unfortunate, due to a painful and annoying quirk in SharePoint’s design. Continue reading “Looking up against Large Lists in Office 365” →

Rounded Corners on Web Parts

2009-06-302014-11-30 Andy BurnsjQuery, Rounded Corners, SP2007 Branding, SP2007 Development, Web Parts3 Comments

The Holy Grail of SharePoint branding – at least as far as I’m concerned – is rounded corners on Web Parts. Every design that comes in has this at first. As mentioned yesterday there are examples of doing this for the web part’s title – I’ve done this using Madalina’s instructions and Heather Solomon has some instructions too.

However, as far as I know nobody has yet figured out a way of putting rounded corners on the bottom corners of web parts. The HTML they have does not suit them to do this via CSS. The only idea I’ve had previously was to use ControlAdapters to modify the output of of the Web Part itself. And I’m pretty sure you’d have to write an adapter per web parts. That kind of sucks; no customer is going to be in a hurry to pay for that.

Well, when I was looking at putting borders around an entire web part zone, I had a thought. What we really need to do is insert elements into our page. jQuery can do that sort of thing. Could I use jQuery to find each web part and wrap some tags around it? Continue reading “Rounded Corners on Web Parts” →

Rounded Corners on Web Part Zones

2009-06-292014-11-30 Andy BurnsjQuery, Rounded Corners, SP2007 Branding, Web Part Zones4 Comments

Curiously, one of my more popular blog posts is about putting rounded corners on things in SharePoint. It does seem that this is a pretty popular question. As a side note, Heather Solomon has a post about doing this for web part titles, though I followed Madalina’s instructions.

Anyway, one design requirement that come up repeatedly is rounded borders on Web Parts. I swear, it comes up with every design – and it isn’t possible (although I have an idea – more on that tomorrow). What you can do, though, is have a rounded border about the entire web part zone… Continue reading “Rounded Corners on Web Part Zones” →

Using jQuery to fix the removal of the Title column of a list

2009-06-022014-11-30 Andy BurnsBreadcrumbs, jQuery, SP2007 DevelopmentLeave a comment

SharePoint List items all have a Title column (although it’s display name might be changed to something else). This Title column is a string, which is unfortunate as sometimes you really don’t need a string column on a list; this was the need I faced.

You can make a Title column not required:

Also, if you go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ page of your list and ‘Allow management of Content Types’ you can then go into your content types and Hide the Title column. This is okay – but the Title column is still there – it’s just being displayed with “(no title)”… Continue reading “Using jQuery to fix the removal of the Title column of a list” →

Clean up SharePoint's UI with jQuery

2009-05-272014-11-30 Andy BurnsjQuery, Lists, ListView, SP2007 DevelopmentLeave a comment

So, the case management system I’m working on has a ‘Mailbox’ library. Really, it’s just an email enabled document library, with the address set to the name of the case. Anyway, when emails are received into this list, we’d like to show the subject, sender, cc, to addresses, and so on. It turns out that email enabling a document library does in fact add columns for those properties (but they’re not automatically added to the default view).

Neat! Until you start looking at the code itself – then it sucks… Continue reading “Clean up SharePoint's UI with jQuery” →

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