Dave Cavins

Switch Themes Without a Page Refresh: Part 2

davecavins — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 14:50:09 +0000

So in part one of this post we got all the CSS and other theme file we needed to stuck them in a document library.

With JavaScript you can change the CSS file a page uses without requiring a page refresh. I have used this technique many times on non-SharePoint sites but there are some special challenges implementing this in SharePoint. Most of the scripts I have used in the past use the alternate style sheet method as describred by A List Apart here. That method works fine but I had to find another way because I was already using that script to allow users to change the font size. After some research I found this script from CSS Newbie that worked pretty well without using alternate style sheets.

The problem

While the script works just fine on regular HTML pages it cause problems in SharePoint here is why :

 $("link").attr("href",$(this).attr('rel'));

This line of code basically finds all the linked CSS files in the page and changes thier value to point to the new style sheet you select. This is fine on a site that just uses one CSS file but in SharePoint bad things happen. In most cases we dont want to completely remove the reference to core.css. For most themes many elements don’t need to be changed so we only have to write the CSS to change them and let core.css do the rest. If you remove core.css its like using a global reset (discussed in more detail here) which means you will have to restyle everything. So them point is we want to leave core.css in the page and just add our theme.

To do this I had to make some changes to the master page to create to interface users will use to swap themes.

Edit the Masterpage

Here is the code I added to the masterpage. This can be styled to look however you want and can be added anywhere in the page that makes sense.


	Reset CSS
	Verdant
	Belltown
	Petal

In addition to this we also need to add a link to our css file to the master page. I put it at the end of the head section.

I added a class to the link so that we can use jQuery to target only that css link and change it to match the theme the user selects. Initially I left the href value blank but if you want to apply some default styles you would just add the link to the css file there.

Use jQuery to Swap the CSS

So here is the code I used to swap the stylesheet. The main thing I changed is on lines 7 and 12. I changed the selector so it will only target tags with a class of ‘altStyle’. This allows us to swap themes without breaking the link to core.css.

Resources

You will need jQuery either locally or linked from Google. Just update the link on line 1 as needed.
In the code above you will notice a link to cookie.js, this is the jQjuery cookie plugin that you will need in order to save users’ theme selections. In the code above on line 13 you will see where I create a cookie named css. For testing purposes you can uncomment line 10 to see what the cookie value is on page load. You can download the plugin from here. jQuery Cookie Plugin
You can see the original code I started from in this script from CSS Newbie

Conclusion

While this is a very simple solution it is a quick way to add in some fuctionality that many users want without alot of custom code or requiring the user to navigate to multiple pages. Users like to feel that they have some control over the site (even if its just changing the color). Feel free to post any questions or comments.

Switch Themes Without a Page Refresh: Part 1

davecavins — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:03:26 +0000

Many sites offer the ability for users to change the color and style of the site to fit their preference. SharePoint has this feature to some extend through themes but changing themes is not a very simple process and requires browsing to several pages.

Users need to be able to switch themes and have the setting saved
No page refresh
Should be able to use both out of the box themes and custom themes

So first I needed to get the CSS files and images for the themes I wanted to use. When you assign a theme to a site all the files for the theme are copied to a folder named _themes in the root of the site.

_themes folder

So what I did was assign each theme I wanted to use to the site one at a time. With SharePoint designer I copied the files folders for each theme into a document library called Site Styles. Each folder contains all the resources needed or the theme to work.

Here is what I ended up with

Site Styles Library

If I wanted to create a custom theme I could just add another folder with my custom CSS and images.

This same technique can be used when developing your own custom theme, just copy one that is similar to what you want and use the alternate CSS link on the master page settings page to add it to the site. Inside of the folder for each theme is a file named theme.css. Link to that file and SharePoint will apply the theme to the site.

Alternate CSS URL

Now everything we have done so far is pretty basic and easy to do but we will pull all this together with some simple edits to the master page to complete the solution. In part 2 I’ll explain how we use JavaScript to switch styles and set a cookie to remember the users theme choice.

Improving #SharePoint Forms – Watermarks

davecavins — Mon, 03 May 2010 18:58:59 +0000

So I found this cool jQuery plugin that does watermarks for form inputs. Using watermarks is a good way to help make SharePoint forms easier to use. To test the plugin I started with the new item form from same test list I used in my previous posts.

Watermarks

Prerequisites

jQuery Library referenced in the page
CEWP on the page

Setup

First make sure you reference a copy of the plugin script. I added the link to the section of the page using the method explained in this post.

We also need some css to style the watermarks

The plugin works by finding all the inputs with a class of “watermarked” and using this title attribute as the watermark. So I used jQuery to select the inputs I wanted to watermark and add the “watermarked” class to them.

Here is the code I used.

$("input[title='Author']").addClass('watermarked');
$("input[title='Title']").addClass('watermarked');
$("textarea[title='Body']").addClass('watermarked');

After the inputs have the right class all we need to do is call the plugin script like so

$('.watermarked').each(function() {
  $(this).watermark('watermark', $(this).attr('title'));
});

Thats all. Enjoy.

Anything Slider in SharePoint – Update

davecavins — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:49:05 +0000

Several people have asked how to change the under of items displayed in the slider and how to change the sort order.

Item Limit

To change the number of items displayed use the code below.



	
	
	'
	0
	
		
	
	
		Table

On line 13 change the RowLimit to the number of items you would like to show. For example if you wanted to show 6 items you would change line 13 to this

Sort Order

Changing the sort order can be done through SharePoint Designer once you are using the updated code

Click on the arrow to show the common data view tasks.
Click on ‘Sort and Group’ the second option.
Make changes as needed.

If dont want to do it that way there is another option.

Open the page in SharePoint Designer
In code view find this ‘SharePoint:SPDataSource’ you will need to edit this tag.
Find the SelectCommand and add/edit the OrderBy attibute.
See the code below for an example. (Ordered by Created Date in Ascending order). Its basically a CAML query.


 If you are not sure how to get it all set up look to my previous post on the Anything Slider.  If you have questions please post a comment.


Related posts:
CSS-Tricks AnythingSlider in SharePoint
Dynamic Drive’s Featured Content Slider in Sharepoint
Switch List Displays with JQuery and CSS

Switch List Displays with JQuery and CSS

davecavins — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 20:58:05 +0000

Sometimes it is useful to allow users to quickly change how data is displayed. Changing the display can make is easier to see patterns or find a specific item you are looking for. With CSS and jQuery we can easily change the way content is displayed and arranged on the page. I got the idea for this post from here

Switch views using CSS and jQuery

Basically by changing the class assigned to a div wrapping the content we are able to change the way things are laid out and hide what we don’t need. Here how I set it up in SharePoint.

I started with a standard Image library and added some images of one of my bikes. I filled in the title and description for each item. You can use this same technique on other types of lists.
Next I created a page and displayed the list in a dataview web part
I edited the XSL to show the items in an unordered list with a class of ‘display’. Inside of each
I used various tags and classes to style the images and descriptions.
```
	
	
	
	
		
	
	
```

Before the opening




Switch Display /* link to trigger the switch */

Then I wrote some css to style the list differently based on the class of the

Below is the xsl and the CSS I used.

XSL (includes the code above)



	
	
		'
		
		
		0
		
		
	
				
					BulTitl
					
					
  Switch Display

CSS

/* normal view styles */
ul.display li a {
    text-decoration: none;
}
ul.display li{
	background:#E3EFFF;
	margin:3px;
	border:1px solid #9FC2F1;
	height:130px;
	list-style:none;
}

ul.display li .content_block {
    padding: 5px;
	clear:both;
    margin:4px;
}
ul.display li .content_block h2 {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 2px;
    font-weight: normal;
    font-size: 1.4em;
}
ul.display li .content_block p {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 5px 5px 5px 145px;
    font-size: 1.2em;
}
ul.display li .content_block img{
    padding: 5px;
    border: 4px solid #336699;
    background: #fff;
    margin: 2 9px 2 2;
float: left;
}
/* thumbnail view styles */
ul.thumb_view li{ width: 200px; float:left; background:transparent; }
ul.thumb_view li h2 { display: inline; text-align:center; margin:2px; padding:2px }
ul.thumb_view li p{ display: none; }
ul.thumb_view li .content_block a img { margin: 5 0 10px; }
/* styles for the style switcher buttin */
a.switch_thumb {

	padding:5 5 5 25px;
	margin:10px;
	background:#D6E8FF url('/_layouts/images/itcat.gif') no-repeat 5px 7px;
	outline: none;
	border:1px solid #9FC2F1;
	font-size:.8em;
}
a:hover.switch_thumb {
	filter:alpha(opacity=75);
	opacity:.75;
	-ms-filter: "progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=75)";
}
a.swap { background:url('/_layouts/images/itcontct.gif') no-repeat 5px 7px; }

If you want to use this same solution for a different type of list just create a dataview Web Part to display the items in the format you want and wrap everything in a container (div, ul, table) with a class. Also use tags (h2, p, span, div, etc.) to wrap the pieces of data you are displaying (this will make it easier to control with CSS). Change the CSS and JavaScript to work with you new container and XSL.

Got questions? Post a comment.

Adding Comments to a List Part 2

davecavins — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:28:05 +0000

So here is what we have done so far from Part 1

Create a custom list to hold our comments
Link the list with an Annoucements list using lookup columns
Create a page to display a single annoucement and the realted comments from our comments list.

This is what it looks like:

What we have so far.

All we need to do now is setup a form on the page to allow users to create new comments on the item they are viewing.

Adding the New Comment Form

Open the page in SharePoint Designer and add a Custom List form to the page below the comments list.

Insert a custom list form

Choose the comments list and select the new item form option

Your page should look something like this:

So now we have a form that we can use to add comments to our comments list but the problem is we need to make sure each comment is associated with the right Annoucement.

Associating the Comment

To associate the comment with the right Annoucement we need to set the value of the post field to corespond with the annoucement we are viewing. To do this we will use a parameter.

In the Common Data View Tasks pane click on Parameters
Create a new parameter (the name does not really matter). Set the parameter to get its value from the query string variable item.

So now we have the ID of the Annoucement and we just need to use that value to populate the Post column. To do this we will edit the comment form.

Click on the small arrow beside the Post field on the comments form and choose Format Item As > Text Box

Now we need to set the value of the text box to our variable.

In code view do a search for asp:TextBox
The code will look something like this

{@post}” __designer:bind=”{ddwrt:DataBind(‘i’,concat(‘ff2′,$Pos),’Text’,'TextChanged’,'ID’,ddwrt:EscapeDelims(string(@ID)),’@post’)}” />

Change the text attribute from {@post} to {$you-param-name}
Save the page and test it. When you load the page the text box should populate with the ID of the Annoucment that is being displayed (the same value as in the qurey string variable). Update the value of the query string variable just to make sure it is changing the text box value.
Once you have verified that the parameter is working properly you can hide the text box by adding the class ms-hidden to the holding it and the holding the label.
Test the form and verify it is working.

Redirect

When you tested the form you probably noticed that instead of bringing you back the the annoucements page you were taken to the AllItems view of the comments list. This is normal but not what we want. To fix this we will have to make a few more small edits to the comments form.

In SharePoint Designer delete the OK and Cancel buttons on the comments form (dont worry we will replace them)
In code view paste this code where you want the save button to be.
Set the redirect parameter to the url of whatever page you want to send people to.
Test the form and make sure everything works

Conclusion

Using this method you can add the ability to post comments to lists that are not blogs. Once you have everything setup and working its pretty simple to make the form and the comments look better using CSS. If you have questions feel free to post a comment.

As a result of some acusations of plagarism I am adding links to some other resources somewhat related to this topic. The point of this blog is not to duplicate or take credit for the effort of others.

Adding Comments to a List Part 1

davecavins — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:05:43 +0000

In SharePoint 2007 the only lists that offer a comments feature are the posts list in the Blog site template. Wouldn’t it be nice to allow people to post comments on other types of lists like announcements or documents? Well after lots of trial and error I figured out how to do it.

What you will need

Two Lists
SharePoint Designer
Basic knowledge of HTML

I’ll assume you already have a list setup on which you want to allow users to comment. For this example I will use a standard Annoucements list.

So the first thing we need to do is create a list to hold our comments. I just used the following columns:

Title
Body
Post (lookup to main list’s ‘Title’ column)

In the main list you will need to add a column that points back to the comments list.

Go to the list settings page and click ‘Create Column’
Name the column ‘Comments‘ (the name does not really matter. Set the type to ‘Lookup‘
The lookup should get information from the comments list you created. The column should be set to the lookup column in the comments list. See the screenshot below. This column will show us the number of comments each item in our list has.

Ok so now that we have the two lists pointing to each other we need to show the comments on a page with our list item.

Add a couple of items to each list just for testing purposes.
Create a blank web part page.
Add a data view web part to the page to display the Annoucements list.
Create a parameter on the dataview named item and set it to get the variable from the query string.
Note : Whatever link user click to get to this page will need to pass the item ID as a variable in the query string in order for this solution to work. In my example I am passing the ID in the ‘item’ variable but you can use whatever you want.

set up parameter
Adjust the filter settings so that the list is filtered using the parameter that has been created. You can test to verify this is working by putting “?item=1” and the end of the url and the list item with an ID of 1 should be displayed.

Filter using the parameter
Add a web part to the page below the data view to display your comments list. Create a web part connection to filter the comments list based on the Title of the Annoucement list item.
Get Sort Filter from

Click Next

Test the page and you should see one annoucement and the related comment. In my next post we will create a form so that users can create new comments.

Print Stylesheet for List Views

davecavins — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:11:20 +0000

Hides everything except the list and the breadcrumbs. More posts coming later this week.

*{ background-image:none; /* remove all background images */ }
.ms-sbcell, /* search box at top of page */
.ms-topnavContainer, /*horizontal nav container */
img, /*images */
.ms-globalbreadcrumb, /*breadcrumbs */
.ms-titleareaframe, /* page image */
.ms-siteactionsmenu, /*site actions menu */
.ms-pagemargin, /* left margin beside quick launch*/
.ms-quickLaunch, /* quick launch menu */
.ms-sitetitle, /* name name */
.ms-menutoolbar, /* list tool bar */
.ms-pagetitle /* page title */
{ display:none; visibility:hidden; /*width:0px; height:0px;*/
}
.ms-pagetitleareaframe table {
position:absolute; top:1px;
width:600px;
background-image:none;
}
.ms-bodyareaframe { /*remove border around main content*/
border:0px;}

Improving #SharePoint Forms – Hints

davecavins — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:22:39 +0000

When users are asked to enter information in a form sometimes it helps to give them a hint regarding what types of information should be entered. Out of the box you can enter a description of each field that will be displayed. If you want something more dynamic here is how to do it.

Add jQuery to the page using the method described in this post
Download the jQuery Hint Box plugin and link it to the page.
Call the script and set the options for the position and html content of the hint. Here is an example:

The above script simply selects the field using its title attribute then sets the css class for the element, its contents and position.

Here is the CSS I used for my example.

.simple_box{
	border:1px solid gray; background:url('/_layouts/images/toolgrad.gif');
	font-size:xx-small; color:#444; padding:7px;
}

Here it is in action.

hints

Improving #SharePoint Forms – Character Count

davecavins — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:21:10 +0000

For the sake of demonstration I made a list called quotes. Each quote has a title, body and author field, as a requirement the body field should not have more than 200 characters. So to let users know when they are getting close to the character limit we will setup a character count script.

For this solution I will use this jQuery script from CSS Globe.

The default form

Setup

So first off we need to add a link to the jQuery script and the plugin. You can do this using a content editor web part but I have noticed in some cases scripts need to be in the section of the page. The easiest way to add the scripts to the of the page is to use the following code.

So once you have all the scripts you need on the page we just need to attach the behavior to the form body form field. To do this we can add some JavaScript to the page in a Content Editor web part. We can use jQuery to select the element we want to target and then configure the plugin settings.

For more configuration options and explanations of the plugin check out this page.
I used the following CSS to style the appearance of the character count text.

.counter{
	position:relative;
	right:14px;
	top:0;
	font-size:12px;
	font-weight:normal;
	color:#555;
	float:right;
	clear:both;
	display:block;
	text-align:right;
	background:#fff;
	width:150px;
	padding:3px;
	border:1px solid #888;
	border-top:0px;
	margin-top:-1px;
	}
.warning{color:#660000; font-weight:bold;}
.exceeded{color:#e00; font-weight:bold;}

In Action

Too many characters

In the next part of this series we will add hints to the form fields and make some other improvements.

Improving #SharePoint Forms

davecavins — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:43:15 +0000

Over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of posts on how to improve the out of the box SharePoint forms by using simple CSS and jQuery solutions. These solutions will help improve usability as well as enhance the look and feel. Look for the first post later this week.

As a point of reference this is what we will be starting with.

Standard SharePoint Form

Stay tuned for more soon.

Displaying a rotating header image with caption

davecavins — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:20:00 +0000

Nothing makes a site look good like nice images. Using a large header graphic on you Sharepoint site can help direct users to some important information or announcement. Many non-SharePoint images use this technique to add interest to their site and attract visitors. Doing something like this in SharePoint will make your site a lot less ‘SharePointy’ (my made up word for sites that look like SharePoint). Here is how I did it.

Rotating images with captions

Setup

Create an Image Library to hold your header images, I named my list ‘Headers’. You can add additional fields to the list if you want but its not necessary for this to work.
Find the images you want to use and re-size them to all be the same dimensions, I used 600px x 200px.
Upload the images to the library and fill in the meta data for each one. Just make sure the ‘Title’ field has something in it because that is what we will use for our captions.

The hard part

Ok really its not hard at all.

In SharePoint Designer and add a data view web part to the page. It does not matter what fields you show in the DVWP the important part is that it is pulling its contents from the Image Library you created.
Switch to ‘split view’ and find the tag. It should be right after the tag in the code. Right click on the tag and choose ‘Select’ tag. Press delete.
Split view

XSL tag

Select Tag
Paste this code where the tag used to be.



	
	
	'
	0
	
		
	
	
		Table

How it works

This code displays the items from our list in an unordered list and then using the jQuery method explained here it randomly chooses one to display. Initially they are all hidden by this css.

You can remove this from the xsl code and put it in your own external style sheet if you want. If you look at the article on CSS Globe where I got the code from there is also a way to make it show images randomly on page refresh.To diplay the captions I am using the Captify jQuery plugin. If you notice in the xsl I am adding a class of ‘captify’ to each image, this is all the plugin needs to work. We just need to reference the plugin file and call the function like this:

In closing

I have seen other methods of showing random content in the Data View Web Part such as this one:

However when I experimented with it there were issues with it choosing id’s that were not in the list and therefore nothing would display. If any one knows of an alternative solution please let me know.Overall this can be a very powerful tool for sharing information with your users. With a few small edits to the code and the list you can easily make each slide link to a page or a list item on your site.

If you have trouble getting this working on your site make sure the references to jQuery and the Captify script are correct, if they are right and you still have issues feel free to post a comment and I’ll do what I can to help out.

Resources

Hiding the user presence icon

davecavins — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:40:48 +0000

When you are using a data view web part to display information including a person field SharePoint always shows the status icon beside thier name.

status icon

In some cases this is exactly what you want and can be very useful. But sometimes you just want to show a name and nothing else. With most fields you can just change the formatting options to change the display. If you choose to format the value as text SharePoint spits out this long html string.

Cavins, David R

Format as

Each of the other formatting options also provides un-desirable results.
Using some basic CSS we can get rid of the status icon and format the text so it does not look like a hyperlink. First wrap the field value in an element with a class. I used a span with a class of “person”

Then just add this css to the page.

.person nobr span a {
text-decoration:none;
color:black;
cursor:default;
}

If you want to take it a step further you can use jQuery to remove the ‘href’ attribute. Using jQuery we can target the container with the link in it and then change the href value.

$('span.person a').removeAttr('href');

Displaying document titles as links.

davecavins — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:23:33 +0000

On a recent project I had to migrate a large number of documents from a legacy system into SharePoint. In the old system users to choose what text would be displayed as the link. In most cases users chose not to use the actual file name as the link text.

The Problem

In SharePoint users don’t have as much control of what gets displayed. There is a ‘Title’ field but it can’t be used in a calculated column and on the standard document library it is not a required field.

Technically the file name could be used but this could lead to very long file names with spaces and special characters that could cause problems by forcing the page to scroll as well as creating some REALLY long URLs.

Depending on the type of document the actual file name may be irrelevant to the use while the title would be more helpful. For instance a in document library of meeting minutes the file names could just be the date of the meeting for example (12_03_2009.docx). The document title could be used to contain not only the date but other relevant information about the meeting like who attended or important issues that were discussed. Additionally the title field can support special characters and spaces that could be a problem in file names.

My Solution

I added two new columns to the Document Library.

“DocSrc” – a plain text column to hold the path to the document.
“Title Link” – a calculated column to create the link (I will explain this later).

First we need make sure our documents have titles.

Here is how to add Titles to a document in Word 2007:
Click on the ‘orb’ and choose “Prepare” > “Properties”

In the pane that opens you can enter in a title and other Meta data.

Now if a user uploads a document without a title we need to let them know and ask them to add a title.

Next I created a simple SharePoint Designer workflow, here is how.
Create a new workflow in SharePoint Designer and give it a name. On the first screen I checked these two boxes:

Allow the workflow to be started manually.

This is because we want the workflow to run for new items but just in case some items have already been loaded in the library we need to be able to run the workflow on them as well. In step 1 of the workflow I check to see if the “Title” field is empty, if it is not I copy the value from the “URL Path” field into my “DocSrc” field. I also added a condition so that if there is nothing in the “Title” field the workflow will email the user and ask them to add a title. In the body of the email I provide a link to the document. That’s all we need for the workflow.

Building the link

So now we have the title of the document and the URL of the document we can build our link in the “Title Link” column. We need to create a formula in the “Title Link” column that will create a link to our document and use the title as the displayed text.
In the “Title Link” column we just need to put the following text:

=CONCATENATE("",[Title],"")

Next we just need to make the html code display properly using this script from Path to SharePoint.

Now users can see meaningful titles for thier documents without having to decifer complex document names and they will still have access to see the document name with the dropdown menu.

When it comes to document management and getting new SharePoint users on board things like this are important in helping them feel more comfortable. If you dont take steps to make the system suit the users needs they are more likely to just use SharePoint as a new shared drive and just dump all their documents into a library that never get used.

Has anyone else dealt with this type issue? What was your solution?

CSS-Tricks AnythingSlider in SharePoint

davecavins — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:10:42 +0000

Chris Coyier from CSS-Tricks built this really cool jQuery plugin that creates a content slider that will support any regular HTML in the slides. This is cool because many sliders I have used had limitations on what could be on the slides and did not offer many of the featuers the AnythingSlider does.

AnythingSlider in SharePoint

Setup

To get this working in SharePoint you will need to make sure you have a reference to jQuery in the page somewhere as well as a list for the slider to read from. For my example I am using an out of the box annoucements list. You will also need the files for the plugin download the anythingSlider plugin from css-tricks.com.

In SharePoint Designer add a dataview webpart to the page with any field from your annoucements list.
Switch to code view and find the first tag. It should be right after the closing tag.
Right click on the tag and choose “Select Tag”. Press delete, don’t worry we will be adding in our own xsl.

Paste the following xsl into the page where you deleted the code.

Important: Adjust the links on the code so that point to your local copies of the css easing and plugin files.

Notes

I made a few small changes in the css file to make things work better with SharePoint. In page.css file I deleted several of the classes so they would not interfere with SharePoint’s styles. In the xsl I used a div with a class of .textslide to wrap the content so I had to change that in page.css as well. To keep long annoucements from breaking the design I set the overflow on the .textslide div to hidden. Below is the code I used in page.css.

/*hide content that is too long */
.textSlide { padding: 10px 30px; overflow:hidden; }
.textSlide h3  { font: 20px Georgia, Serif; margin-bottom:12px; }
.textSlide h4  { text-transform: uppercase; font: 15px Georgia, Serif; margin: 10px 0; }
.textSlide ul  { list-style: disc; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
.textSlide ul li  { display: list-item; }

I did not make any changes to slider.css. It may be easier to just combine the tow files to keep things simple and reduce page load times.

Conclusion

The AnythingSlider plugin is lightweight, powerful and easy to customize. Adding this type of functionality that is common on regular websites to a SharePoint site can help guide users to important information and of course make your site ‘cooler’ than the average SharePoint site.

The code above just shows all the items in the list but once you have it working it is easy to add your own sort/filter parameters to the data view so only certain items are shown.

The slider could also be implemented to run off of the SharePoint list web service the same way I did in this post. If you have any questions or comments feel free to post.