The Edge

Developing Custom, Connectable Web Parts in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 provides a rich model for developing communication between web parts.  This is useful in scenarios where you need to pass either simple string values to another web part, perhaps to display and filter custom Parent-Child data, or pass complex objects for processing and rendering.  The principle of Web Part communication is that it is contractual and interface based.

Consider a scenario where Web Part A must send a simple string value to Web Part B as shown below.  Web Part A is the provider and Web Part B is the consumer.

Creating Custom WebPart Pages For Microsoft SharePoint 2007

SharePoint 2007 comes with about 8 different formats of WebPart pages but you soon find that these aren't enough. You can write code to add ASP.Net pages to the FileCollection but if you are after a way of creating WebPart pages based on custom templates in the same way you create WebPart pages on built-in templates its not easy to find a solution. In the past, I have created  customised WebPart pages for SharePoint 2003 by creating customised WebPart templates and generating the actual WebPart pages from these. I leaned how to do this from this article on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms916835.aspx. Thankfully with just a few tweaks to the solution described in this article it is possible to create custom WebPart page templates that can be used to generate custom WebPart pages in SharePoint 2007.

Follow the instructions described in the MSDN article but make the following changes. Under the section entitled 'To configure a customised Create Page ', in step 1. Copy the Custspcf.aspx page to:
Local_drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\
If you want the images of the template WebPart pages to show in the Custom WebPart creation form search open the Custspcf.aspx and search for:

var strImagePath = "images/"; '

How to use the Content Editor WebPart to add style and substance to your SharePoint pages Part 1

This is a quick solution for power users of SharePoint to spice up their Web Part pages. These tips will be particularly relevant to anyone who does not have access to the SharePoint templates and can even be used by anyone with very limited access to design their own pages, but feel a little bit constrained by the styles and templates that have been provided to them. It could possibly be used in most other Content Management systems.

If you have ever created a web part page, you will know that one of the most useful Web Parts is the content editor. It lets you write simple html, even writing most of the tags for you. It’s great for laying out your message to your page readership and setting your own style inside the box.

Sometimes however you want to play around outside the box and even with decent access rights, SharePoint is crazily complicated to configure correctly. You may have a choice of 8 Web Part Page templates to choose from, but maybe none of them offer exactly the layout you require. Also when adding multiple web parts to one zone you have no easy way of controlling how the web parts flow, either horizontally or vertically.

Even something simple like adding 2 calendar controls to one zone horizontally does not work correctly.