A Better Annoucements Ticker

A while back I did a post about how to make a vertical news ticker, in the comments several people pointed out problems with the code so I decided to write a better version of the code. Here it is.

New Ticker

For this ticker I started out with a default Annoucements list. Because I wanted to display a thumbnail for each annoucement I added a signle line of text column called Subtitle and a Picture column called Picture. Here are the columns I used.

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CSS-Tricks AnythingSlider in SharePoint

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 <xsl> tag. It should be right after the closing <DatasSources> 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.

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Limitations of displaying attachments in DVWP

So on a recent project I needed to show a link to the attachment for each item in a list. A quick Google search found How to show Attachments with DataFormWebPart from Dario Martirani Paolillo’s Web Log. I was excited because it seemed to work well and was very easy to implement. 

As I was about to finish up the project I was given some new requirements which meant that there would be two Data View Web Parts on the page and both would need to show the attachments link.  This is when the issues started.  When you have two web parts on the page using the display attachments code the second one will just show “[value of field: Attachments]” instead of the actual link.  If anyone knows a good solution for this issue please post a comment.

I want to avoid using something like this jQuery solution by Paul Grenier simply because of the performance issues it will create.

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 »