UX & IA Design Thinking

Have you ever struggled with the summary view for Links, Announcements, Events, Documents, Discussions or any other major type of SharePoint 2010 list or library on publishing pages? Well if so I hope this post will help with the identification/resolution of this bug. Hopefully Microsoft will supply a fix for this someday... Here is a common scenario: You create a SharePoint Publishing Site or you create a blank site and then enable the publishing feature. From that publishing site you create a simple links list. You add in a few links and want to then display it on your publishing page. You edit the publishing page and then click on a webpart zone and add the newly created links list on the page. From here instead of configuring the webpart to display in summary view you simply keep the current view and check the page in. You then edit/check out the page again and decide to modify the links list to show in “Summary View” to get it to display like a bulleted list...

In this post I will walk you through the process of adding in “Hidden” metadata to your page layouts so that they are only visible when editing the page. For example if you want to create a news article with categories, start date, end date, keywords, and other metadata that might not be relevant to the consumer then instead of forcing your content authors to create content in the edit mode and then force them to update metadata by editing the page properties why not have them all on the page. This allows for a single page authoring experience. This post also provides the specific field names for the most common SharePoint 2010 base columns and web controls. (Really good stuff) Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls Namespace Standard columns that are used for most metadata column types. URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms413880.aspx Example: <SharePointWebControls:RichTextField FieldName="MultipleLines" runat="server" /> Microso...

For content authors the ability to stylize web parts with just a few simple clicks is a big win. In some cases you might want to emphasize a web part on the page and make it stand out. There are basically 4 main web part styles/chrome that you can apply to any webpart. You will notice below that the chrome type “None” and “Title Only” do not have a unique class name so they will share the same style. The “None” style simply does not show the web part title. Chrome ( None ): . ms-WPBody { font-size:8pt; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; } Chrome ( Title Only ): . ms-WPBody { font-size:8pt; font-family:verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif; } Chrome ( Title and Border ): . ms-WPBorder , .ms-WPBorderBorderOnly{ border-color:#9ac6ff; border-width:1px; border-style:solid; } Chrome ( Border Only ): .ms-WPBorder, . ms-WPBorderBorderOnly { border-color:#9ac6ff; border-width:1px; border-style:solid; } ...

After 6 months of hard work my SharePoint 2010 Branding Book: Practical SharePoint 2010 Branding and Customization   is finally available for order from Amazon !!! If you are quick and order now, you can get it under your tree by tomorrow! This book is a great deal as it comes with 2 pre-built visual designs , a visual studio solution for applying the designs, and of course a great resource book to help you on your branding journey. The two Visual designs included in the SharePoint Branding Kit : Many thanks to Chris Arella, Matt Lally, Robert Dornbush, and the team at Apress. This would not be at all possible without the support from my family and friends! Happy Holidays!

Have you ever wondered what are the major font types, sizes, colors, and images for SharePoint 2010? This post will cover some of the major statistics that are related to SharePoint Branding. This post originally spawned the topic of why SharePoint uses PT’s for font sizes when PX or EM’s are much better. Kyle Schaeffer created a very nice post about why you should use one format over the other: http://kyleschaeffer.com/best-practices/css-font-size-em-vs-px-vs-pt-vs/ . Over 75% of all font sizes declared in the standard SharePoint 2010 base style sheets use a font-size in Points. Example: font-size:8pt; Below are some other interesting statistics when it comes to other SharePoint 2010 support file statistics. Server Side Files: Not surprisingly there are a lot of images that are used to make SharePoint look the way that it does. The number would be slightly larger if the sprite images were broken out. There a ton of CSS files and what surprised me most is the amount of uni...