SPC2011: Best Practices for Creating Publishing Page Layouts

Notes from the SharePoint Conference 2011
Session: Best Practices for Creating Publishing Page Layouts

• Use DIV tags for positioning
• Only give users control to alter content when they need it
• Use case: Brembo (http://www.brembo.com )
• Example: jquery against dataform web part

○ Site has an area that flips through multiple images
○ Images are kept in an image library
○ Add library fields like “order” to configure image order and time from library

• Modal Dialog framework (ie lightbox)

○ Part of the client object model
○ Example: when you click on a news preview, it opens the news article in a lightbox
○ Consider using a modal dialog over a page reload – appears faster to users

• EditModePanel & delegate control

○ EditModePanel – content area that is only viewable/editable when edit page. Used to add page metadata (ie “Summary” or “Keywords”) –> increases search optimization
○ Delegate control – Region in an aspx page that allows content to be replaced with custom content without having to redeploy the page layout. Retrieve data in the editmodepanel fields and put it in the metatag in the head -> search engine optimization

○ Content Query web part (CWQP)

§ Customize to look up page field value and filter content based on value
§ Field needs to be a managed metadata property

• Dataform – Rolls up information from multiple data sources – beyond the site collection boundaries
• Content Query web part

○ Use when possible because of it’s flexibility to customize
○ Consider having it pull configurations from an splist so easy for a site owner to change the configuration parameters if needed

• CQWP caches while dataform does not
• Create as few page layouts as possible and make them as multi-purpose as possible
• Content Types

○ Reusable collection of metadata for a category of items in a splist
○ Create Content Types mainly via Sharepoint Designer (SPD) and Visual Studios (VS)
○ SPD – Pro: easy, Con: less flexible, page becomes customized
○ Visual Studio – Pro: flexible, Con: developer tool
○ Consider designing in SPD but implementing in VS

• Visual Studio plugins

○ http://cksdev.codeplex.com
○ Caml .net intellisense – http://bit.ly/hV4xe5