Archive for April, 2008

“It’s Silverlight, it’s strong and tight, they got it right, try it tonight”

April 30th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

Over at Dan Wahlins blog you can listen to a new Silverlight song.

Go check it out and relax to some sweet Silverlight music.

- I know, I’m a geek.

SharePoint Forums WebPart : What’s going on?

April 28th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

Update: This product is available as per this article: http://www.zimmergren.net/archive/2009/09/01/tozit-sharepoint-discussion-forum-solution-for-wss-3-0-and-moss-2007-released-today.aspx

As a follow-up to my previous blogpost: "Forum Web Part for SharePoint" I thought I’d let you know the status of my personal pet-project.

I’ve been getting alot of feedback regarding the Forum WebPart which is soon to enter it’s beta-testing stage. Thanks for the feedback in terms of the comments to my previous blogpost and all the emails I keep getting regarding the SharePoint Forum WebPart.

Status

The status of this project is as follows:

I’m currently trying to get as much done on the SharePoint Forum WebPart as I possibly can on my (few) free hours right now. I’ve got tons to tend to before I go to Egypt in May (which by the way will be awesome).

I plan to release it for alpha-/betatesting before I go on vacation to Egypt though, and I’ve been getting some response as to whom might be interested in testing it.
Unfortunately not everyone left their email, which makes it hard for me to contact those individuals.

So if you’re not sure, or know that you didn’t send over your email but you want to try the WebPart out, add a comment here and include your email. ;)

This is what the SharePoint Forum WebPart currently looks like:

Basic overview of all availible forums
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Basic overview of threads in a forum
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Basic features:

  • Forum Management
    • Manage what forums exists (Using the default SharePoint interface)
  • Thread Management
    • Manage threads (Using the default SharePoint interface)
    • Create new threads (Using a custom interface) – ugly as hell
  • Post Management
    • Manage posts (Using the default SharePoint interface)
    • Create new posts (replies) – also ugly as hell :)
  • Breadcrumbs
    • [Home] > [Forum] > [Thread]
  • Forum Statistics
    • Last post
    • Last poster
    • Total posts
    • Total threads
    • Total forums
  • Paging (WebPart Property, meaning you can set this property yourself to a desired amount of items per page)
  • Theming
    • Supports all built-in themes
    • Supports custom made themes
    • (All styles for the forum is using the built-in SharePoint CSS classes)
  • etc. etc.
Feedback, suggestions, comments and all of that

This is still a work in progress, and I’d like for YOU to leave a comment with suggestions about functionality, accessibility, usability, usage, features etc.

Thanks for tuning in, see you around!

Office Labs site launched – I urge you to check it out!

April 28th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

All I can say is, go check out "Office Labs" for yourself (click here).

And by the way, DO check out the "Community Clips" section. It’s awesome.

That’s all I had for now, back to coding some enhancements on the Forum WebPart which is coming along nicely… Just wish one had more time ;)

Forum Web Part for SharePoint

April 15th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

People have been requesting a better discussion forum functionality than the one in SharePoint by default. I took that request and made it into a new personal project of mine.

Currently the forum looks like any forum you see on the web, but it’s using- and is based entirely on SharePoint and the SharePoint database (no need for additional SQL setups etc).

I can only give you a preview of how it looks so far, there’s still some issues to take care of before the first beta will be released for those interested in testing it out.

The Forum WebPart supports theming and therefore you can simply design your own theme, or use a built-in theme in order to modify the look and feel to adjust itself to your SharePoint site.

As seen with one theme
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As seen with another theme
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Feedback please

Some people have requested to be betatesters for this WebPart when it’s being published to beta.
If you’re interested in being a betatester, please leave me a comment and you’ll be one of the first to try it out.

If you’ve got some comments and/or suggestions in general for a Forum Webpart like this, please leave a comment.

Thanks for tuning in again, see you around!

Italy next – arrivederci for now!

April 10th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

We’re going to Italy with our company (350+ nerds).
It’ll be a blast and we’ll stay there until this Sunday.
 
Keep your eye out for new posts when I get back - I’ve got some nice ideas cooking.

Pingback/Trackback hell with EBE 2.0 Final

April 9th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

As many of you have noticed, I’m getting a whole lot of spam in my ping- and trackbacks – Enhanced Blog Edition for SharePoint is missing some kind of spam-check for the trackbacks.
 
I will get to it to clear them out as soon as possible, but I’m going to Italy tomorrow and got tons of things to tend to before that.
 
Hang in there ;)

Tip: RequestAccessEnabled programatically using the SharePoint Object Model

April 9th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

I bumped into a strange problem today. It wasn’t hard to solve, but worth mentioning.

To manually enable the option to request permissions to the site, you do this from Site Actions – Site Settings – Advanced Permissions – Settings – Access Request.
From that page you can specify if users should be able to request permissions to the site, and who should receive the email.

RequestAccessEnabled via code instead

No worries so far, but this time I had to do this through code upon dynamically creating a new site. This means that we need to speak to the object model in order to get things right…

When you consult MSDN, it clearly states that this property ( web.RequestAccessEnabled ) is a get/set property which you can get or set via code. However this is not the case. It’s a get-only property which means that you can’t really use it to enable access requests.

This is simply solved by using the somewhat similar property called RequestAccessEmail. So, if you do web.RequestAccessEmail = tobias@zimmergren.net; you’re automatically enabling the request access for that site.

Now your users can simply see the "Request Permissions" link in order to submit a request to the specified email-address in order to join the site.

(Just a tip to those of you who read MSDN and tried to follow it blindly ;)

Have a good day.

The attack of the RSS – Sorry

April 9th, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

As I’ve been re-writing some (many) of the URLs in my blog people have been complaining that they got duplicate RSS entries.
 
The URL re-write took about 20 minutes, under which period a total of 7 people sent me the comment that my RSS was fubar – Now it’s fixed :)
 
Thanks for tuning in, and thanks to David for noting the errors in the URLs.

CKS:Enhanced Blog Edition – Enable Search

April 1st, 2008 by Tobias Zimmergren

The other day I started coding a custom searchfunctionality to use with the Community Kit for SharePoint’s Enhanced Blog Edition (CKS:EBE) – which is what this blog is running on.

However, while it would be fun and all to create a new custom search functionality for the EBE – someone beat me to it.

Daniel over at ZevenSeas has posted a blogpost on the subject and explains what the searchbox can do.

You can download the project on codeplex here.

Screenshots of the searchbox in use with the EBE:

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Hope that you can find some good use for this searchbox, it’s working really good to be honest. Good work Daniel.

Some more customizations are to be done, then I’m set for tonight and will shortly begin my Silverlight 1.0 integration blogpost which I’ve postponed for too long now.

Cheers