Also on the Microsoft front, there’s now a web site about migrationing MCMS 2002 and SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007.
Of course, SharePoint 2007 isn’t really called that – really, it’s called (ahem) ‘Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007′. SharePoint ’07 it is then…
So I found that PowerPoint slide shows that had been added into MCMS were being retrieved as just plain PowerPoint files. What this really meant was that the file’s mime-type and extension had been changed from ‘PPS’ to ‘PPT’.
This was a pain – it’s just not as pretty as having the file open as a presentation.
It turns out the culprit for this was IIS – it didn’t have a mime-type defined for ‘.pps’. I fixed this using the advice from Microsoft’s support pages – PowerPoint Show (*.pps) file copies as a PowerPoint (.ppt) file from an IIS Web server.
What the article doesn’t mention, though, is that for MCMS, this change needs applied not to the website, but to the ‘NR/rdonlyres’ directory within the MCMS site.
I was asked today to add a file to a page. The file itself was only 6Mb, and MCMS was having none of it. Digging around, I found the problem wasn’t actually MCMS itself, but the underlying ASP.
It turns out you need to add the following to your web.config file, to change the maximum file size that ASP accepts:
<httpRuntime
executionTimeout="3600"
maxRequestLength="10240"
useFullyQualifiedRedirectUrl="false"
minFreeThreads="8"
minLocalRequestFreeThreads="4"
appRequestQueueLimit="100">
</httpRuntime>
I’m not sure what all the settings do – but the executionTimeout is in seconds, and the maxRequestLength is in Kb.
I’ve been doing some work in MCMS that involved building navigation controls; apparently this is much easier in Sharepoint 2007 as it uses .NET 2.0 navigation controls. I found a tutorial at 4GuysFromRolla
Three books I’ve been using lately…
Microsoft Content Management Server 2000 – Addison Wesley
This book covers a lot, and so is quite fat. I found the chapters a bit variable – some, especially those on planning your site, were excellent. Other missed steps when describing how to do things, which made it very confusing. I felt that some of the code examples lacked context too – the functions might have worked okay, but where in the project were they? Also, the chapter order confused me – I’d much rather have had intro, install, configure, develop, etc.. Instead, this seemed to have a bit here, a bit there. For example, I would have moved chapter 3 (CMS Architecture) before chapter 2 (Installation), and followed that up with the entire of section 4 (security). All in all, not bad, but not as good as…
Building Websites with Microsoft Content Management Server – Packt
This book seems to me to have a much clearer layout. Introduction, Installation, Configuration – that’s what I like. Although a slimmer book, somehow this does seem to cover more ground. The text is distinctly techy, and it lacks some of the ‘planning’ chapters mentioned above, but it really gets in under the hood, and tells you how to do the sorts of things you’re bound to want to know. For example, I’d been annoyed by how the previous book hadn’t really described channel rendering scripts.
All in all, I was impressed by this and would recommend it, although…
Advanced Microsoft Content Management Server Development – Packt
…this is also a pretty good book. Aimed as an ‘advanced’ book, it tackles more advanced subjects (like SharePoint integration, Infopath, search, etc.). It also seems to be aimed at ‘making your life easier’ – I like books with title like ‘Useful Placeholder Controls’. It sort of falls into the ‘things you’ll probably want to know’
So, in summary, I’d recommend the last two books – they share some of the same authors. And if you haven’t had a question answered by Stefan Gossner, you haven’t worked with MCMS yet. It’s just a bit of a shame that these books will be redundant come Office 12
You can’t control the space between a bullet point on a list-item, and the text that follows it. That’s a real pain – I was trying to put bullets into a narrow column. Controlling the indent was, well, tricky too.
Why is CSS unable to style obvious things like this? I mean, radio buttons? Checkboxes? Grrr… 
Comments from my old blog:
Workaround = ditch the standard bullet, create an image, place it left top, use some left padding.
Hey Rew,
Yeah, considered that, but it was too complicated – I was driving this through Microsoft Content Management Server – the users have access to ‘unordered lists’, but asking them to just use images would have been a bit too much.
Plus, it would make site-wide changes impossible.
