Displaying document titles as links.

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.

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Styling SharePoint Blog Comments: Part 2

As promised I went ahead and styled the comment form on a standard SharePoint blog.  I wanted to make it look better than this but there are some limitations because of the way the page is coded with so many nested tables. 

Better looking comment form

I kept the styles pretty simple but this should be a good starting point for someone wanting to do something more complex.
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Styling SharePoint Blog Comments

Out of the box the comments on SharePoint blogs dont look that good. 

Standard SharePoint blog comments

 Here is a way to fix that problem. Just add this CSS to the page and things should start looking alot better. Read the rest of this entry »

Dynamic Drive’s Featured Content Slider in Sharepoint

I have used Dynamic Drive’s Featured Content Slider on a couple of recent projects and wanted to see if I could get it working in SharePoint. There were several key requirements:

1. User can easily add items
2. Users  can choose a style for each item
3. Expired Items must not show
4. Each item will have a Title, Body and a customizable “read more” link.

Here’s how I did it.

First I created a custom list to store the slider items.  These are the columns I used:

Title – Single Line of text
Body – Multiple Lines of text
Link URL – HyperLink
Expiration – Date and Time (expired items will not be shown)
Image – Picture
Style – Choice  (we will use this column to allow users to choose the style of each item)

On the page I used a DataView WebPart to display the Title, Body, Image and Link URL columns.   Using Sharepoint Designer I setup filtering on the expiration date.  To do this in design view right click on the data view webpart and bring up the “Common Data View Tasks ” box and choose Filter.  In the window I set the conditional statement so that items would only be shown if the expiration date was greater than today. Read the rest of this entry »

Adding Suggestions to the Sharepoint search box

I got the idea for this from here: http://cssglobe.com/lab/searchfield/. The idea is that by giving users suggestions of what they should be searching for they can be guided to the most important information. When I am searching for something many times I am unsure what what search terms will give me the best results.

To get started we will need a search box to work with.  The out of the box search box could work but I prefer to use the one mentioned here by Kyle Schaeffer because it gives me a lot more flexibility with the design.    Read the rest of this entry »