One of the great features of SharePoint is that it is built on-top of .Net, thus allowing nearly unlimited modifications via additional code. Most of the time this additional functionality would be added via Web Parts, features, etc, but sometimes it would be nice to add inline code to a specific SharePoint managed aspx page. But by default SharePoint does not allow code blocks in .aspx pages.

The way around this is well documented but I keep getting asked can you add code blocks directly in your page, and if so, how. It’s quick and easy so let me explain.

First, an example

Say you want to create your own Search Results page. There are many ways to do this and I will leave a full explanation to another article. For this example I simply made a copy of the SearchResults.aspx file found in the Layouts directory in the 14 hive, added it to the root directory of my SharePoint site in SharePoint Designer and renamed it OSSSearchResults.aspx. Anyhow, say in your Search Results page you want to have the search string displayed somewhere on your page. You might add a line of code like:

<h1><SharePoint:EncodedLiteral runat="server" text="<%$Resources:wss,searchresults_pagetitle%>" EncodeMethod='HtmlEncode'/> : <% SPHttpUtility.HtmlEncode((Request.QueryString["k"].Length > 20) ? (Request.QueryString["k"].Substring(0, 20) + "...") : Request.QueryString["k"], Response.Output); %></h1>

Easy enough. This code will take the Querystring, and if it’s over 20 characters long, truncate it, and display it one the page. Yes, you normally would not blindly trust the user’s input and display it on the page, even with SharePoint security, but for this example, it works. If you add this code block, then load your page in a browser, you receive an error, “An error occurred during the processing of /OSSSearchResults.aspx. Code blocks are not allowed in this file.”

To enable code blocks in this file, on the server you need to open this site’s web.config file, by default found in c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\”the site directory”, and look for the following code block in the <Configuration> -> <SharePoint> section.

<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="false" DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
   <PageParserPaths>
   </PageParserPaths>
</SafeMode>

By default the <PageParserPaths> section is blank. All you need to so is add the following to the <PageParserPaths> section:

<PageParserPath VirtualPath="/osssearchresults.aspx" CompilationMode="Always" AllowServerSideScript="true" />

i.e.

<SafeMode MaxControls="200" CallStack="false" DirectFileDependencies="10" TotalFileDependencies="50" AllowPageLevelTrace="false">
   <PageParserPaths>
      <PageParserPath VirtualPath="/osssearchresults.aspx" CompilationMode="Always" AllowServerSideScript="true" />
   </PageParserPaths>
</SafeMode>

Notes:

You can use wildcards for the VirtualPath value, i.e. VirtualPage=”/Pages/*” to allow all pages to include code blocks. I wouldn’t suggest this though, add a <PageParserPath> section for each page you wish to add code blocks to.

There are three values for CompliationMode:

AllowServerSideScript can be set to true or false. In this case it must be true.

For wildcard paths, you can add another tag, IncludeSubFolders=”true” to <PageParserPath>.

That’s it, save the web.config file and your page should now load.

While at SharePoint Conference 2011 last week in Anaheim, California, I was asked to participate as the SharePoint Branding Expert at the “Ask the Experts” event. I was asked a few questions that required code to better explain. I already provided code on a fixed footer in SharePoint 2010. Another question came up regarding SharePoint Branding and My Sites. Below I provide some guidance on a way to modify person.aspx in the My Sites site collection.

One of the conference attendees was having difficulties with the layout in their My Sites person.aspx page that loads the public profile of their employees. In particular they wanted to add content or a web part that could not be modified by the end user. What I suggested was simply adding a web part directly into the person.aspx page using SharePoint Designer.

Opening My Sites site in SharePoint Designer

My Sites in SharePoint 2010 is just like any other site in SharePoint, meaning that if you have the correct permissions set up, you can open your My Sites site collection in SharePoint Designer. Once you do this, look in the Navigation Bar under All Files. In the root of your My Sites folder you will see a few aspx pages. The public profile for each of your users is defined by the person.aspx page by default. Open person.aspx and then in Code View, click on Advanced Mode found in the Ribbon, in the Editing section.

Now you can go ahead and update the person.aspx page as required. I have two quick ideas.

Add a web part outside of a web part zone.

This will lock the web part, so that it cannot be modified or removed via the web browser.

Or how about this.

Automatically add a web part to a web part zone

Adding a web part to a web part zone in the person.aspx would make it much easier for an administrator to modify or remove the web part via the web browser. This may or may not be a problem, that is up to you.

The outcome of the two different techniques in my examples would produce a very similar outcome from the perspective of those that visit someone’s Profile page.

Conclusion

Using either a prebuilt web part, or custom web parts, you should have no problems modifying the person.aspx page to meet your needs. You could use the RSS Reader webpart to pull data from many sources, you could pull data from lists, many options are at your disposal. You could also add jQuery and other hardcoded html/css/javascript to provide rotating banners or messages.

There is a catch that you will want to be aware of. This method requires you to add the webparts to the Master Page itself so the account you are using to modify the masterpage would require the proper permissions to write to this file. Along this same line, since you are modifying the Master Page, all users would see the same web parts, you could not use this technique to allow each user to modify the web parts on their profile page.

How have you modified your My Sites site collection? Or what are you trying to do? Please tell me, I and others would like to know.

While at SharePoint Conference 2011 last week in Anaheim, California, I was asked to participate as the SharePoint Branding Expert at the “Ask the Experts” event.

One of the conference attendees was having difficulties applying a fixed footer to his SharePoint 2010 Foundation site. After trying to explain the theory of having to modify the height of the s4-workspace div, I told him I would create sample code for him and publish it on our PixelMill blog.

Please note that this solution requires javascript as well as a current jquery library. I have found so few browsers that do not allow javascript that I believe this to be a reliable solution. I also assume that the ribbon will stay at the top and that the s4-workspace div is still being used for your primary content.

Create the Fixed Footer

Creating a fixed footer is easy enough. All you need to do is create a new div and add it most anywhere in your Master Page. It can go almost anywhere because it will be fixed to your browser window. I recommend right after the closing </div> tag of your s4-workspace div though. So after you create a copy of your v4.master Master Page, because we all know you should never modify the v4.master file directly, add the following code, right after the closing tag of the s4-workspace div.

<div id="footer-fixed">
</div>

You can of course add whatever content, child tags and containers, etc, you want within this footer-fixed div. Next we need to provide basic css for this div, that has an id of footer-fixed. Add the following css in a location of your choice.

If you choose to add the css to the head section of your Master Page, add the following just before the closing </head> tag.

<style type=”text/css”>
#footer-fixed {
	position: fixed;
	height: 60px;
	width: 100%;
	bottom: 0px;
	left: 0px;
	background-color: #000;
}
</style>

Or just add what is between the <style></style> tags in an alternative CSS location or your own custom stylesheet.

What this little block of CSS code does is tells the html element with an id of footer-fixed, our footer div, that it’s position is fixed to the browser window, that its height is 60 pixels (you can change this as needed), it’s width is 100%, or the entire width of the window, and to then position the element 0 pixels from the bottom of the browser window and 0 pixels from the left of the browser window. I have set the background color to black just so that the footer is more visible without any content.

You can change the height to fit your needs, but I do not suggest adding margins or padding to this footer div. If you need padding and margins then I suggest you add a child div within this footer-fixed div and apply the margins and padding here. This is primarily because if you want left or right padding or margins then the width is no longer 100% and if you add top or bottom padding or margins then the browser will have more difficulty determining the height of the div.

If you added the style directly to your Master Page, go ahead and save the Master Page if you wish and set it as your default master page for now. If you added the css to a custom stylesheet, update your Master Page to reference this stylesheet and save. Reload your site and you will see the fixed footer, but if the page you load has too much content to fit in the browser window then the vertical scrollbar ends up under the fixed footer. This is because the right and bottom scrollbars are not a part of the browser window, rather they are added by SharePoint’s init.js javascript file to the s4-workspace. This was Microsoft’s way of having a fixed ribbon on the top of SharePoint sites and has caused many Branding projects delays.

So how do we fix this?

My method is to use a little jquery and a built in javascript function provided by SharePoint. We will now want to link to jquery somehow. I personally suggest downloading the latest jquery library from jquery.com, then adding it to your Style Library, Site Assets or scripts directory. In my case I added it to the /Style Library/scripts directory.

Then add the following line of code to the head section of your Master Page.

<SharePoint:ScriptLink language="javascript" name="~SiteCollection/Style Library/Scripts/jquery-1.5.min.js" runat="server"/>

I added this line just after the <SharePoint:CustomJSUrl runat=”server”/> line, although you could add it to the bottom of your head section. Don’t forget to change the “name” value to match the directory where you placed your jquery library.

Finally add the following javascript at the bottom of your <head> section

<script type="text/javascript">
function resizes4WP()
{
	if ($("#s4-workspace").length && $("#footer-fixed").length)
		$("#s4-workspace").css('height', ($("#s4-workspace").height() - $("#footer-fixed").height()) + 'px');
	}
	ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded(function () { SP.UI.Workspace.add_resized(resizes4WP); }, "init.js");
</script>

This is where the magic happens. What we are doing is creating a simple function, resizes4WP that makes sure that s4-workspace and footer-fixed exist. It then simply modifies the height of the s4-workspace div to allow room for the fixed footer. Great little function, but we need it to run after the browser has already fired the built in javascript code that determines the proper height of the s4-workspace in the first place. Luckily SharePoint 2010 provides such a function, then ExecuteOrDelayUntilScriptLoaded function. You can learn more about this function here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff411788.aspx, although the gist of it is that any time the s4-workspace div is resized, our function will be triggered right afterwards.

Conclusion

There are other ways to accomplish this same task. I have heard of using padding at the bottom of the s4-bodyContainer div, but then you have to add more javascript to still account for the size of the s4-workspace div to make the horizontal scrollbar visible.

Have you used a different technique? Please tell us as others would probably like to know as well.

Well after one excellent, long week, SPC 2011 is over. Although we only got to a few sessions, the ones we hit up were great.

It was nice meeting the many of you who stopped by our booth. Being the only company dedicated to SharePoint Branding at this conference gave us an opportunity to hear all of the many ways that you are trying to customize the SharePoint platform.

It was encouraging to hear several presenters stress the importance of branding in their presentations. We know it’s not always easy and there’s often little information available to address the number of questions about effectively branding in SharePoint.

Also of interest was just how many people showed up to this conference. There was no major launch of a new version, no major annoucements, no major impovements, yet between 7,000 to 8,000 people were here. This goes to show just how big and powerful the SharePoint platform is. A few other key points that I noticed through sessions and listening to others is the growing importance of governance in SharePoint 2010 and the power available if you need it. Sure SharePoint has built in workflows, allows for great collaboration between groups and more, but there needs to be a plan in place to guide or steer the process.

Another often heard topic of conversation was SharePoint’s built in search and FAST search. If you haven’t looked into FAST Search Server for SharePoint, I suggest you check it out. The results from FAST Search Server provide an amazing intranet search of content and people and allow for searching, sorting and filtering your organization’s data that will make your SharePoint users more productive. But do not take FAST Search Server lightly, with power comes responsiblity. A good search administrator is a must with FAST Search.

Lastly, for those of you who attended the conference, don’t forget that all session slides and session videos are available online in your MySPC account for the next three months. Go review the sessions you went to or find out what you missed when you were too busy, or unable to maybe drag yourself out of bed for a 9am session Wednesday morning?

We look forward to helping provide more valuable content, as well as essential products and services to address your concerns. Feel free to learn more about how PixelMill can help your SharePoint Branding projects.

What a great experience. Last night during the SharePoint Conference 2011 “Ask the Experts” night, it looks like the SharePoint Branding table experts were unable to attend.  A huge thanks to Erik Swenson, author of the upcoming book, “Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization” from APress  for helping pick up the slack.

But what was exciting to me is that someone came by, threw me a shirt and said get in there, we need a SharePoint Branding expert in there now. I was of course happy to lend a hand as was able to help quite a few attendees out with their branding questions.

For those of you that needed examples emailed to them, I will try to get those out to you as quickly as I can. I appreciate everyone’s patience while I gave every person as much assistance as I could, even after they started turning the lights out on us.

Thanks to the organizers for recognizing PixelMill’s expertise in the SharePoint Branding field. We will continue to look forward to helping all of you out both online and at events we attend with all of your SharePoint Branding needs.

Do you need more hands on assistance with your next Branding project? Check out our SharePoint Custom Services page.

We would be happy to help.

Alright dear readers, PixelMill is here at Mircosoft’s SharePoint Conference 2011, in sunny Anaheim, California. If you are not going to be here, you can read more about this conference at the SharePoint Conference 2011 site, www.mssharepointconference.com. The rumor is that this show is sold out at over 7,000 attendees. Way to go SharePoint Nation.

You can find us at booth 160. Please stop by and talk to any of our team members any time the Exhibit Hall is open. Let us know if you have any questions about how to brand SharePoint or problems with your customization project. We’d love to help.

It’s great to see the number of quality exhibitors at the event. SharePoint is really attracting the best tech providers around. What’s interesting though is that it looks like we are the only company dedicated to SharePoint Branding as far as we can tell while we were walking around checking out the other exhibitors and their booths.

For those of you who will be joining us a SPC 2011, what is in store for you? Based on the list of sessions, hands on labs, outside activities including a trip to Disneyland Tuesday night just for Conference goers, this is going to be a packed week. I highly recommend you attend Randy Drisgill and John Ross’ sessions on branding, as well as sessions hosted by Ted Pattison. He’s a great speaker with excellent information to share. I am sure the sessions that SPC has lined up will be great.

There are also great sessions on Search, Workflows, Infopath, SharePoint and Social, Administration, Architecture, and much more. In between sessions, be sure to hit the exhibit hall and stop by to say hello.

Hope to see you soon.

One of our customers recently turned me on to a new tool that may help you migrate to Office 365. The tool is called MetaVis Migrator by MetaVis Technologies. You can learn more about their product here.

Migrate to Office 365

Some highlights
You can migrate to Office 365 from such platforms as:

• SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2007
• SharePoint 2003
• BPOS

This will maintain your meta data including when an item was created and last modified.

You do not need to install anything on your SharePoint server.

They offer a free trial although if you would like to purchase the product you will need to contact MetaVis Technologies as they do not publishing their rates.

Summary
This looks like a great tool if you are considering moving your SharePoint based site to the cloud. If you are going to move your SharePoint site to Office 365, don’t do it by hand, find a good tool to help you. I think MetaVis Migrator will be that tool for many users.

What has your experience been with MetaVis Migrator or any other Office 365 tools you have used? Tell me, I would like to know.

Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference is the world’s premier event dedicated to the SharePoint platform and its related technologies. This year Microsoft’s SharePoint Conference 2011 will be held in Anaheim, California October 3 – 6 and will feature over 240 sessions focusing on SharePoint 2010 best practices/guidance, cloud services and real world experiences. PixelMill is excited to announce we recently confirmed we will be attending as an exhibitor offering our SharePoint Branding expertise and services.

PixelMill has worked with SharePoint for years providing companies and organizations branding solutions for their SharePoint projects. From easy to install SharePoint templates to full custom, public and private facing SharePoint web design, PixelMill’s expert design team provides a full range of branding services to meet the needs of the SharePoint community.

This will be the first time we are attending the conference as an exhibitor and we are excited to present our SharePoint branding services. As more companies and organizations focus toward cloud based web applications to streamline business operations, SharePoint 2010 is emerging as the preferred platform because it offers an enormous amount of flexibility. Companies and organizations can efficiently collaborate internally, better manage its business systems and documents, and even build an external layer for its customers from within the same system. But developing, deploying, and administering SharePoint projects is often overwhelming as much of the resources are dedicated to ensuring a functional experience. As a result, the visual end-user experience is often neglected.

PixelMill’s SharePoint web design professionals offer branding services that connect the functional needs with the end-user’s desired experience. If you’d like to see more about our solutions, see our SharePoint branding and design page.

If you plan on attending this year’s SharePoint conference, we invite you to stop by and meet the team.

Last week a colleague and I attended the Internet Retail Conference and Exhibition held in sunny San Diego. The IRCE is one of the largest e-commerce conferences boasting a list of impressive speakers, resourceful workshops, and a myriad of exhibitors that span the e-commerce ecosystem. It certainly seemed like the place to be to get a sense of the e-commerce pulse. And apparently this year’s conference had the most attendees and exhibitors of any previous year which was a telling sign that the momentum behind e-commerce continues to grow.

We haven’t attended an e-commerce conference in a while and I was curious how the emerging trends in e-commerce, specifically social, mobile, and cloud-based technology would be reflected in the products and services offered by the exhibitors.

Being one of the largest e-commerce conferences in the country there was plenty to absorb and while the workshops and speakers offered wonderful discussions about what is emerging in e-commerce, the exhibit hall offered an opportunity to gauge the current mindset of businesses catering to e-commerce merchants. This was of particular interest to PixelMill as we look to improve on our services as well as focus on new opportunities.

Social Marketing was the hot topic.

There’s no doubt that e-commerce merchants are realizing the importance of integrating social channels to their overall marketing strategy and there was no shortage of businesses promising to help e-commerce merchants gain more insight, traffic, conversion and ROI. It seemed like everyone was offering some social integration product or service and yet I still heard a number of people talk in the lobby about not using social because it was too time-consuming or they weren’t sure how to use it in their business.

It’s not that e-commerce merchants don’t realize the importance of social integration but many are still stuck in the process of figuring out how to set it up in a way that’s easy to manage and fits their business goals. Learning the right approach and the right things to say as well as finding the right person to manage the process is critical as well.

Social media integration should not be difficult. Often the hardest thing is defining your goals for using it. Consider starting with a simple goal, whether that is to build a fan base, use it as an extension of your customer service, or simply follow your brand to see what others are saying about you. Setting up a store on Facebook may appear sexy but it’s not the answer for everyone and that’s okay.

Short on Mobile.

While the conference offered a number of informative workshops on mobile commerce, I was actually disappointed in the few number of exhibitors offering business services around mobile. Sure many exhibitors displayed their own QR codes for contests and landing page content, but it seemed mobile services took a back seat compared to the social media services offered, which seems like a huge opportunity missed.

All signals point to the increase of mobile usage and merchants must consider adapting to this medium sooner than later. This includes creating an enhanced mobile experience for users that not only focuses on delivering content fit for their device but also adapting new functionality that will allow mobile users to share information and make it easy to buy. It’s not just about shrinking the size of a current ecommerce website to fit a mobile screen, and merchants who get this are looking for easy solutions to integrate a mobile channel without having to move their entire store to another ecommerce platform.

It’s encouraging to see Internet Retailer hosting a mobile commerce forum in October which should help define strategies and tactics that merchants can use to benefit from mobile commerce.

E-commerce software aplenty

Merchants certainly had a number of companies offering end to end ecommerce platforms. I would have thought that eBay’s recent acquisition of Magento would have scared them away but they came out in full force. I expected Big Commerce and Volusion as well, but was surprised at the number of smaller companies still vying for market space. Unfortunately our old partner ProStores did not attend which could have helped alleviate the concerns about the future of their platform in light of the Magento deal.

While the number of e-commerce software platforms is a healthy sign of innovation there are very few options that offer a complete solution. PixelMill has always sought to partner with viable platforms that are easy for merchants to use, offer cutting edge functionality, make it easy to scale, and offers the option to customize. ProStores offered a quality blend of all these characteristics but with a bleak future we turn our attention to other options.

If you’re considering rebuilding or upgrading your e-commerce store, contact us to see how you can transition away from your current platform to a solution that shares the same core elements we value and makes it easy to incorporate multiple website optimization strategies like social, mobile, and search engine optimization.

Overall I must admit that I’m excited for e-commerce merchants as a wave of new technology and new mediums come together and offer an opportunity to create some really cool stores. The prospects of engaging customers in a whole new way while customizing your website user experience to fit the specific device they use to consume information on the Internet sounds big but nonetheless exciting.

Is your website ready for the future of e-commerce? Maybe it’s time it should be.

Don’t miss our series on optimizing your Web presence to get a sense if your site might need an update.

If you have ever right clicked a master page in SharePoint Designer, you probably noticed that you can set a master page as the default master page as well as the custom master page. When you create a new SharePoint 2010 site, by default, you will notice that the v4.master master page, found in the /_catalogs/masterpage directory, has already been set as your default and custom master page. But what is the difference?

There are two primary differences.

First, the kicker in my opinion, the custom master page is the master page that pages that inherit from the PublishingLayoutPage class use. You can read more about this in an article I wrote a little while ago (Difference Between PublishingLayoutPage and WebPartPage Classes).  This is rather important in Publishing sites, or Foundation sites with Publishing enabled. Let me repeat this because it spins many developers for a loop every time it seems. If you have a publishing site and you create a new publishing page, (a page that goes into the /pages/ directory), any layout page that this page uses will always use the master page that is set as the custom master page. Even if you attempt to change the page declaration of the layout page, the page will still end up using the custom master page. The best way around this is to create your own class that inherits from PublishingLayoutPage that your layout page can then use. This is not a trivial task though and is beyond the scope of this post.

Second, which is more obvious, a default and custom master page allows you to easily create and use two master pages throughout your SharePoint site collection and/or each sub site. You could create your default master page that some pages will use and then create a second, custom master page that other pages will use. Obvious enough.

As an example, related to our first discussion of custom master pages and Foundation sites with Publishing features enabled. You could create a site with pages in the sitepages directory that utilize the default master page, while at the same time having pages in the Pages directory (that utilize layout pages) that will use the custom master page. This provides you the ability to easily have two different styles in one site. Now the changes might be extreme or just slight, but would be best handled in the master page.

A second example would be where you want to simply have two different types of branded pages in your SharePoint site that be easily switched to a different master page as needed. What I mean is that if you have Branding A and Branding B, A being for top level pages and B being for lower level pages, and each needs say a slightly different header and quick launch bar layout, you could set A pages with the default master page and B pages with the custom master page. Now if you ever had to change Branding A pages to use a new default master page, you could just set your new master page as your default master page and all Branding A pages would automatically begin using the new default master page. This would be a lot quicker than if you had hard coded the master page file in each of Branding A pages Page declaration.

Finally as a quick reference, to set a page to use the default master page, your page declaration would look similar to

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WikiEditPage" MasterPageFile="~masterurl/default.master" meta:webpartpageexpansion="full" meta:progid="SharePoint.WebPartPage.Document"   %>

While if you wanted to set a page to use your custom masterpage, your page declaration would look similar to

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WikiEditPage" MasterPageFile="~masterurl/custom.master" meta:webpartpageexpansion="full" meta:progid="SharePoint.WebPartPage.Document"   %>

I hope this has been a help. Have you found other reasons to have a default and custom master page? Please tell us.