The user group kicks off with Penny Coventry who will kicking off with “Branding SharePoint Sites: Using the browser and SharePoint Designer 2007/2010″, which will cover what is possible with 2007 in terms of design and a little sneak peek into SharePoint Design 2010.

After myself I will be followed by Nikki Ashington on Accessbility.

Also here a little bit of trivia for you. Nikki was who got me into SharePoint design when she was on site at my previous employment  as a design consultant – so she is to blame

UPDATE – here is the write up of the event, really good feedback for the event – http://macraem.wordpress.com/2010/01/19/suguk-nottingham-14th-january-2010/

In side the SharePoint master page everything is set to Height:100% – EVERYTHING, even I feel I am set to Height:100% when I have finished looking at the damn code! Removing these can cause all kinds of hidden issues so my rule of thumb is if CSS can bully in line styles then let it go to town them!

The problems crop up when you want to add a custom footer that combined with a small resolution causes this…

As you can see this isn’t very user friendly and looks pretty poor. Well I used my trusty tool set of web apps to find out the cause and hopefully a fix and I feel I have found one. If you use this line of CSS code in your style sheets it will increase the height of the properties pane on the right hand side.

#MSO_tblPageBody {
 height:500px !important;
}

This is the fix I have found which has worked for me – if anyone knows a better one or an improvement on mine then feel free to share!

The CQWP is a fantasic webpart my only two annoyances are that you can only do 3 rules on the filtering and the second is that the results are a bit rubbish in terms of styling, look and feel.

There are two ways you can customise these results. First way is to put a DIV wrapper around the results and style them that way which is ok when you want to do text styling such as color change, style and padding which you can see in the orange box. You can do this by using the styles below but remember – you need to put a DIV wrapper around the Web Part Zone and/or Web Part.

#blogbox .link-item,
#blogbox .link-item a:link,
#blogbox .link-item a:visited,
#blogbox .link-item a:active
{
color:#990000;
font-family:arial;
font-size:1.15em;
font-weight:bold;
}

When looking into this I first tried to style the A tag that is used for the TITLE which read ‘New version of Free2Teach launched’ which worked ok until there was a long title line that wrapped around and underneath. This caused it to visually break and look poor. I then thought I am going to have to do this properly if I want to do it!

What I did was very very simple, I started by opening up ItemStyle.xsl inside the XSL Style Sheets within the Style Library. Next I took a copy of this file (very important!) and then added the following below. I set the template name to ‘ReadMoreLink’ so I could remember it when selecting it in the CQWP settings.

<xsl:template name=”NewLinkDefault” match=”Row[@Style='NewLinkDefault']” mode=”itemstyle”>
        <xsl:variable name=”SafeLinkUrl”>
            <xsl:call-template name=”OuterTemplate.GetSafeLink”>
                <xsl:with-param name=”UrlColumnName” select=”‘LinkUrl’”/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name=”SafeImageUrl”>
            <xsl:call-template name=”OuterTemplate.GetSafeStaticUrl”>
                <xsl:with-param name=”UrlColumnName” select=”‘ImageUrl’”/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name=”DisplayTitle”>
            <xsl:call-template name=”OuterTemplate.GetTitle”>
                <xsl:with-param name=”Title” select=”@Title”/>
                <xsl:with-param name=”UrlColumnName” select=”‘LinkUrl’”/>
            </xsl:call-template>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name=”LinkTarget”>
            <xsl:if test=”@OpenInNewWindow = ‘True’” >_blank</xsl:if>
        </xsl:variable>
        <div id=”linkitem” class=”item”>
            <div class=”link-item”>
             <xsl:call-template name=”OuterTemplate.CallPresenceStatusIconTemplate”/>    
                <a href=”{$SafeLinkUrl}” target=”{$LinkTarget}” title=”{@LinkToolTip}”>
                    <xsl:value-of select=”$DisplayTitle”/>
                </a>
                <a href=”{$SafeLinkUrl}” target=”{$LinkTarget}” title=”{@LinkToolTip}” class=”readmorelink”>
                  read more
                </a>

            </div>
        </div>
    </xsl:template>

What I have simply done is coped the full A reference and copied it underneath and set the class to ‘readmorelink’ and added the following css to my style sheet and it should work

.readmorelink {
display:block;
text-indent:-9999px;
background:transparent url(‘../Images/ergoimages/readnewsitem.jpg’) top left no-repeat;
color:#666666;
margin:10px 0 0 0 !important;
padding:0;height:27px;
font-family:arial;
font-size:1.15em;
font-weight:bold;
}

Whilst doing some branding work for a client I was asked ‘can we have different text colors’. I instantly thought of hours of HTML teaching and had visions of brightly coloured pages illuminating fire red, yellow and radioactive greens! So what I needed to do was lock it down so the client can dictate the colors but the users can set them.  The best way to do this is give them a selection of custom styles they can use for titles that are outside of the standard h1, h2 & h3 that are set.

.ms-rteCustom-CustomStylesh1 { color: #990000; font-size:3em;font-weight:bold;}
.ms-rteCustom-CustomStylesh2{ color: #666666;font-size:2em;font-weight:bold; }
.ms-rteCustom-CustomStylesh3{ color: #cccccc;font-size:1em;font-weight:bold; }

The way it works it by adding .ms-rteCustom-NEWSTYLENAME the RTE will pick up this style and will insert the desired styling.

Recently a good friend of mine Martin Coulthurst of Lightness recently backed up his computer and asked me about various things he would need to backup, I had a think and we bounced a few things back and forth on what we need to back up, conversation ended and he did his install. The next day we spoke and he realised he forgot one or two very important things – fonts! This then prompted me to think about a little check list of items that I will be thinking about when next back!

1. Get yourself an external hard drive

With the price of external hard drives now a days there is no excuse for not having the money to buy one. Over at Overclockers.co.uk they have a Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB USB2.0 External Hard Drive for £62.99 – bargain! Get this and you are ready to go!

2. Documents

The treasure chest of any designer, if like me in this folder which can sometimes be called the Desktop (!) has everything saved picture files, word documents with little notes, CSS snippets and even the stray file called something informative such as smd-application3.php which a week ago was as familiar to you as your date of birth, 2 weeks down the line means nothing!

3. Browser Settings, Favourites & Add-ons

There isn’t an easy to back up your browsers settings unless you download a 3rd party tool. In my experience I find that proxy settings, browser adds-ons such as FireBug/IE Dev Tool bar are my most important ones. Best and easiest way to do this is either – take notes or print screen them into a word document.

• To find out FireFox add-ons – Tools > Add-ons
• To find out IE add-ons – Tools > Manage Add-ons
• To find out Safari add-ons – Help > Installed Plug-ins
• To find out Opera add-ons – Widgets > Manage Widgets

Favourites is also something important you want to backup, as designs and most other IT people know how annoying it is when you find something and don’t bookmark it, well that feeling is multiplied by a million when you’ve lost ALL your favourites, trust me I know.

To find your favorites they are here – C:\Documents and Settings\PCNAME\Favorites

4. Fonts

Another little designer’s paradise – all the fonts you’ve sound, all the various versions of Arial that are slightly thinner or slightly bolder. Some fonts you’ve found and probably not paid for. All these can be found within the Control Panel > Fonts.

Useful resource if you have lost all your lovely fonts – http://www.csstea.com/css-gallery-news-and-resources/807-11-best-free-fonts-websites.html

5. MSN/SKYPE conversations

I find keeping my conversation that I have had with clients is pretty useful. Whether it be checking back on something you maybe of lightly agreed to or something you may have said to a client or something else you can’t remember, it’s pretty useful to go back and check.

If you are saving MSN conversation you can find them here – C:\Documents and Settings\COMPUTERNAME\My Documents\My Received Files\EMAILADDRESS1212445099954\History.

If you want to turn conversation saving on in MSN then open up the main MSN window – Tools > Options > Messages > Message History (at the bottom)

6. Email

I personally use Gmail and Hotmail just for the fact that if my system does die, I have this backed up online – for free! But if you are using Outlook then I recommend doing a PST backup of all the email, this may take a while so remember to stick a DVD to pass the time – I recommend the film Hunger – the story of Bobby Sands – Fantastic film.

7. Software

Everyone knows how annoying this is when you have your software suite perfect then the manufacturers go and do something intelligent like release a new version of software that is poorer than its predecessor (MSN Messenger &amp; Fireworks CS4!) or discontinue the software you are using. I tend to keep my software AND products keys backed up, I suggest you to do the same! Last thing you want is a deadline date, dead system and no software! At least if you’ve backed up you can install what you need as a short term measure. A site I recommend is OldVersion – http://www.oldversion.com/ which I am sure you can guess what the site is about.

8. Media

Pictures, Music, films or even ambient sounds of frogs or even System of a Down albums (what I use to design to) is all pretty important when you’re in the ZONE.

9. FTP site lists

If like me you have 1 FTP programme with all the sites that I look after listed, then you will be pretty annoyed if you lost all them! I do have them all saved but it is a chore having to wade through emails trying to find each and every site you look after! Even if you have then found chances are the FTP password has been changed so you have to then log in to the cPanel or dashboard to get the details so its a pretty good tip to save these!

Most FTP programs come with an export/import option that usually exports out as a CSV or text file of some kind. This option is a winner for me, I probably would use an FTP programme that doesn’t have this feature – WiseFTP 5 does and that is what I use.

10. Client list & business documents

This is probably THEE most important thing to back up, I personally carry all these on USB stick which is locked away in a fireproof, flood proof and child proof safe. My client list has all my clients’ names, emails, contact numbers and dates of work and what was done. Just imagine if you lost this? I actually feel anxious writing that! Same goes with business documents, all backed up just in case anything happens.