This has caught me out three times now – I build style, but the top border for the global links ‘My Links’ link didn’t show:
I checked my style, and there it was. So I tried adding a margin, or padding in the cell that contained it.
Wrong. It needs it’s height to be set to 100%.
.ms-globalbreadcrumb .ms-HoverCellActive,
.ms-globalbreadcrumb .ms-HoverCellInctive,
.ms-globalbreadcrumb .ms-HoverCellActiveDark{
height:100%;
padding-top:1px;
}
SharePoint has a lot of page elements, and it’s hard to brand it all without missing things. Lists of Page elements like Heather Solomon’s CSS Reference Chart and her “Oh crap, I missed that” list help, but I still found a few that weren’t mentioned. So, I guess this is my “Thank God my testing found I’d missed that” list:
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Advanced Search Page – nice grey. |
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Creation Information Panel – when you hover over an item on the ‘Create’ page, you’ll see this. |
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People Search Options – shown dynamically when you click the link. |
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Gantt views - as used in projects |
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Repeating Meeting Left Nav |
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WSS Search results page – just ‘cos you’re using it doesn’t mean it isn’t there – or that it won’t be seen… |
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The Date Picker – and all the problems inherent in that… |
You can apply themes to sites in SharePoint – but what actually happens when you do? Continue reading
As noted previously, Meeting Workspaces use a different master page to the ‘normal’ master pages in SharePoint. This is a little annoying – if I need to apply a new master page, how would I do this?
Well, you can activate a new master page in a Feature Receiver. And we can detect the type of site we’re dealing with. Why not combine the two techniques Continue reading
Themes have a couple of big advantages over Master Pages:
…but there are some pain points too:
It’s certainly worth considering how your theme will be applied up front – although you could using the Alternate CSS url to ‘apply’ your theme. Personally, I think I like the idea of using a Feature.
I’ve built a feature to active branding on a site including master page, navigation and themes, which I’ve been talking about a bit over the last few weeks. One issue, though is that meeting workspaces have a different master page to ‘normal’ master pages, so I need to set them to use a different ‘custom’ master page when the feature is activated. This means that my feature receiver has to ‘know’ if the site it’s being activated on is a Meeting Workspace, or some other site.
What defines the ‘type’ of a site is the template that was used in it’s creation. Continue reading
I’m beginning to hate the SharePoint DatePicker control. It displays with different widths:
What defines the width of this control? Damned if I can see – it appears to be the widest element within it. This means either:
This is probably less of an issue for Americans (right) than the British (left) – I presume that other Europeans will have the same issue.
Certainly, this will result in some squashed looking calendars on certain months. Yet try as I might, I couldn’t get the calendar to fill an entire area.
And why does the American format give the day and the normal format not?
A while back I posted about the how daft that the datepicker control isn’t styled by themes, and is in the _layouts directory, so you shouldn’t edit them.
Well, a while later Michelle posted with a good idea of how to brand them – use an alternate CSS URL. I must confess, this tip passed me by until my recent branding efforts, and I discovered her tip.
So why does this work? Well, if we crack open the file iframe.aspx (which I still think is a bloody stupid name. I mean, the defining feature is the DatePicker control, not the bloody iframe it uses) we can see the code:
There we go – code to insert the alternate CSS url (but not themes – obviously).
So, I gave this a go:
Tada! Styled date picker, nice one Michelle. However, she notes that it has to be applied to a publishing site, or to a publishing site and all sites below it. Site collections based around a team site would be tricky. Normally, this page is used to set the alternate CSS…
[image of site]
… and, well, Team sites don’t give you that page.
However, we can achieve this in code! All the admin page does is change the SPWeb.AlternateCssUrl property for a site or set of sites. We could have a feature receiver (a bit of code that is run when a feature is activated or deactivated) to do this:
public override void FeatureActivated( SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties ) {
SPWeb site = properties.Feature.Parent as SPWeb;
site.AlternateCssUrl = "[Your URL here]";
site.update();
}
More evidence that brands are best applied by feature receivers. Maybe I should make an example of this…
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve written a brand that is a combination of Theme and Master Page, and is designed to be activated by a feature receiver. When the feature is deactivated, it should restore the previous Master Page and Theme – but it wasn’t doing this for the default theme. Weird.
Well, here’s another good tip from Madalina you have to apply a theme of none, not Default.
web.ApplyTheme("none");
That’s the second tip of hers I’ve found on Google and used in the last 2 weeks. Maybe I should start watching that blog. Anyway, I guess that ‘none’ makes sense when you look in 12/TEMPLATES/LAYOUTS/1033/SPTHEMES.xml – the default theme has a TemplateID of ‘none’.
‘Course my next problem for my feature receiver is that Meeting Workspaces use master pages (MWSDefault.master) that are significantly different to other pages – thanks guys, that’s helpful…
