Notes from the May SharePoint User Group Meeting
Last week at the Wellington SharePoint User Group I did a repeat presentation on the customisation options available for changing the look and feel of SharePoint based sites. There were about 50 people at the session. The presentation slides and the resources are available here.
http://www.chandima.net/Blog/Articles/Presentation.aspx
The options that’s available for customisations are
One of the things I would like to highlight to everyone on the subject of customisations and my experience with working on several SharePoint projects is that planning for customisations will need to be made right from the beginning.
This is very important for projects that will use SharePoint as a web content management platform. If your site is being designed and developed by an external agency you should involve the information architects and the designers from the early stages of planning. This will ensure that you can estimate the amount of effort and determine complexity of the design elements. The next stage is to involve the SharePoint architects and the development team who will implement the look and feel.
From a pure ‘design’ perspective SharePoint is NOT limited in any form whatsoever. If anyone says that a specific design can’t be implemented with SharePoint it will most probably because of lack of understanding of the capabilities of SharePoint.
**Dynamic Designs vs Compliant Designs **
As an example the following site Glu.com uses SharePoint to deliver dynamic content to mobile gamers. The site is designed and delivered in SharePoint.
*“Glu is a leading global publisher of mobile games. Its portfolio of top-rated games includes original titles Super K.O. Boxing!, Stranded and the Ancient Empires franchise, and titles based on major brands from Atari, Harrah’s, Hasbro, Microsoft, PlayFirst, PopCap Games, SEGA and Sony. Founded in 2001, Glu is based in San Mateo, California and has offices in London, Hong Kong, France, Germany and Brazil. Consumers can find high quality, fresh entertainment created exclusively for their mobile phones wherever they see the ‘g’ character logo or at http://www.glu.com” *
Recently Mike Gannotti posted a blog post of how Microsoft Silverlight can be used in SharePoint to deliver dynamic rich media experience to users. He has a competition running to see who can show the best integration story between the two J
[http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/pages/SharePoint_Silverlight%20Contest.aspx](https://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blogs/mikeg/pages/SharePoint_Silverlight Contest.aspx)
At the other extreme is an e-government compliant web site from the UK based on SharePoint.
http://www.plymouthhospitals.nhs.uk/Pages/Home.aspx
This site is WCAG 1.0 AA compliant and provides colour contrast and font size options for the visually impaired. To build a site like this in SharePoint the starting point has to be at a custom site definition plus building some smart web parts to render compliant mark-up. The beauty of the SharePoint platform is that it’s possible to do these things because it’s built on ASP.net.
Vincent Rothwell’s blog has the best information on how to render proper mark-up using XSLT rendering and a few other tricks for MOSS. http://blog.thekid.me.uk/
Also by using control adapters and building your own web parts it is possible to achieve this.
Basically a control adapter allows you to plug-in into any ASP.NET server control and override, modify and/or tweak the rendering output logic of that control to output the mark-up that you require.
Information about the CSS control adapters are available here:
http://www.asp.net/cssadapters/
http://www.codeplex.com/cssfriendly
Scott Guthrie also has a very good post on how to use these in a Visual Studio 2005 environment.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/09/08/CSS-Control-Adapter-Toolkit-Update.aspx
So with that in mind developers should be able to deliver a site using techniques used for building web sites regardless of the design look and feel and that the web site is built on SharePoint.