This server control will help you hide html elements which shouldn’t display in ‘display mode’ if a certain SharePoint field is empty. This must be a common requirement amongst most SharePoint projects so I’m surprised that I haven’t covered this earlier as its not commonly documented elsewhere. More...

Quite often, a client wants a SharePoint site to be completely setup after deployment. Such was the case on a recent project that I worked on.

I had a custom site configuration inside a custom ONET.xml file. Which defined a set of features to be activated in a particular order. One of these features was designed to manipulate the current web’s navigation settings.More...

If you need to copy a web part from one place to another, you can use the out of the box import/export functionality that SharePoint provides. A scenario where you have been asked to add a web part with specific configurations, to ten different locations, can present quite a challenge to perform manually. Here I will explain how you can do this in a more efficient manner. More...

On nearly all of the SharePoint implementations I've participated on, there has been a requirement to customise the look and feel of the search results page. This makes sense because it would be odd from the user experience for the SharePoint look and feel to change all a sudden when the user decides to search for a keyword.
Here I will try to explain how to create a custom search site template that uses one custom search results layout for all different types of search results. More...

The Summary Links control is a great way to allow content editors to add links to other content using a simple content editing method. One of the limitations of the Summary Links control is in its ability to allow rich text on the description field of an item. More...

If you’re ever creating a custom site definition for SharePoint, it is likely that you would be required to attach a site logo to the site definition and are left wondering why such an obvious property does not exist in onet.xml. Recently I came across this situation and although the work around may be known amongst the community, it is not really well documented on the web (as I discovered while trying to find one). More...

Every now and then, I come across an error that seems to be so simple, yet after trying all the obvious remedies, I'm left the wonder whether the resulting error is unsolvable by some form a memory loss in my head, or something bizarre built into the third party system which I'm trying to wrestle.

Recently I came across such a situation and I spent a bit of time trying to figure it out until a colleague told me something about SharePoint that I didn't know.More...

Many SharePoint projects require migrating existing functionality and content from the client's existing  systems to a new SharePoint site.  While content migration is more straight forward, existing functionality which is usually in the shape of standalone aspx pages can be difficult to accommodate within SharePoint. Here I will try to identify the options available to achieve this. More...

In some cases, one of the requirements of a SharePoint project is to provide two versions of the same SharePoint site. One with 'forms' authentication where the users information is stored in a database and the other with 'windows' authentication where the user is authenticated via the active directory.  Though its easy to deal with each of these scenarios by writing separate pieces of code, it is not going to as quick as using the out of the box functionality provided by SharePoint 2007.More...

I came a across this issue recently when I created a new SharePoint theme. After much trial and error, it turned out that a colleague who had created a new master page, had missed out the SharePoint theme control reference that renders the link to the custom theme css file. However this took a while to work out since there was so many other possible points of failure for the theme not taking effect.

Here I've listed some steps that can be taken to pin point the source of the problem with your custom theme. Before you start, you must understand the consequences of making changes through SharePoint designer. It is an important topic to learn about before touching your SharePoint site through SharePoint designer in any case.More...