Pimp My SharePoint

This post is about customising SharePoint and is part of my series on Supercharging SharePoint Server.

If you already develop web applications on the Windows, IIS, SQL and ASP (WISA) stack you may be forgiven for thinking that writing for SharePoint will be relatively painless, after all SharePoint has a base layer – Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) – which is built on top of the ASP.NET framework (with SharePoint Server built on top of this assemblage).

Developing for SharePoint may however require you to suspend this thinking (a bit) and understand that many complex challenges have already been solved in SharePoint; and that the task at hand is shifted away from developing the architecture to subscribing to a more delineated framework in which to design your application.

Some common elements of a SharePoint site are:

• Top-level website – a top-level site is the uppermost site in a site collection.
• Sub-sites – one or more sub-sites can be created below the top-level site; sub-sites can also be created beneath other sub-sites.
• Lists – a list is a table of columns and rows (similar to a database table), items can be added to a list using the list’s form. Lists are highly customisable and can be used to store many types of data.
• Document Libraries – a document library is a special kind of list that is designed to hold documents.
• Web part pages – a web part page usually contains one or more web part zones where users can add web parts.
• Web parts – web parts can be used to redefine content from lists and libraries or to endow the page with additional functionality.
• Event Handlers – custom event handlers can be added to sites, lists, items and content types to alter or extend their behaviour, such as performing additional business logic when an item is added to a list.

To deliver the site 'My UK Youth' on SharePoint Server we used all of the common elements of a SharePoint site and then applied some configuration changes, custom pages and form layouts, content types, controls and web parts including:

Tips and pointers

Enhanced site map path control

Our take on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server People Picker using Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax