Top Blogger Web Part – No code required
Note: Toni has updated the web parts below. He’s also included a Spanish version.
Laura Rogers posted an interesting business requirement at Stump the Panel of End User SharePoint:
Here’s a question that came in from jlschu1:
I am trying to create a web part on a SP blog site that will display the top bloggers for that site. There is a large group of people writing posts on one blog site, in one list of posts. I want to show the top bloggers based on their number of posts.
Laura solved the problem with SPD workflow which sounds interesting. Laura, I can’t wait to see it.
I took a different path and created a "non-code“ required web part to solve this. This web part is similar to my Blog Posts Archive web part.
I made two flavors: tag cloud and a simple list. See figure below.
To deploy, simply upload these to your SharePoint web part library. This is a "no code“ solution and you do not need console access to your server.
You can use these on any site based on the default blog site template (English). In case you have a site in some other language, drop me a line.
- Download tag cloud web part
- Download tag cloud web part (Spanish version)
- Download top posters web part
- Download top posters web part (Spanish version)
In future articles I’ll cover how to build these step-by-step.
Author: Toni Frankola SharePoint Use Cases Toni started his Web adventure in late 90’s and has been working with various web technologies ever since.
Toni is leading project engagements and managing a team of consultants specializing in Microsoft technologies. His primary focus is on Microsoft Office SharePoint and Dynamics CRM. He works at Perpetuum Mobile, a Microsoft Gold Partner from Croatia.
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These are nice, I’m assuming you have to have a “Tag” column defined as a blog column for the tag cloud to pull data?
No, I do not :)))
The tag cloud displayed above only shows top posters e.g. Craig posted 5 posts and his name is the biggest one in the tag cloud.
Hi!
Excellent resource! Do you have both web parts available for spanish blog site template? Or how I can build them for that language?
Thank you in advance!
P.D. Sorry for my bad english!
Can we have similar webpart for list items too? That will be really useful showing that which item were accessed most in that list.
@Manrike: Ok I will install Spanish language pack and let you know.
@Shalin: Yes, but this web part does not display the number of access but number of posts. If you need to count e.g. “a top document/item creator” in document library/list let me know.
Tom,
Great web parts. However, the top posters web part uses a natural sort for the post counts. This is fine until the posts get into double digits. which results in:
Jane Doe (5)
John Doe (3)
Landon B (13)
As it ’sees’ the 5 and 3 as greater than 13.
When i try to use the tag cloud webpart no data is displayed. When i open the page in SharePoint desginer I get this error:
DataSourceID is either missing or set to an empty string
The Top Posters Web Part works fine! Any ideas?
I get the same exact results of no data for the Authors Tag Cloud.
@Manrike: You can download your Spanish version here: (http://www.sharepointusecases.com/index.php/web-parts/). SharePoint looks very nice in Spanish
@Darren & Rex: The issue is fixed. This article will be updated shortly, download new version here (http://www.sharepointusecases.com/index.php/web-parts/)
@Landon: Wow you do have a lot of posts :))). Let me think a bit and I will let you know how to solve this. In the meanwhile you could try to use authors tag cloud.
Excellent, thank you.
Great!!
Thank you very much for your post!
Best regards
As I mentioned earloer about this very handy web part: it uses a natural sort, which will say that 2 posts is greater than 12 posts.
To use an actual value sort, find the following line (which can be edited through the XSL editor of the web part, you do not need to export, unless you want to add it to the gallery):
and add the following attribute:
data-type=”number”
so the line now looks like:
This will sort correctly.
-Landon
OK the comment parser removed my XSL ;). Here is how the sort line should appear without the carrots:
<xsl:sort select=”count(. | key(’Posts-By-Author’, @PostedByWithDate))” data-type=”number” order=”descending”/>
Can this work with lists? I would like to use a tag cloud in a template i have that is similar to the MSFT Knowledgebase template.
I would like to take this same idea and use the cloud to display results by category, not be author. Is this possible?
It would be useful a step by step doc to show us how to build it.
thax
wonderful post. I tried implementing this and it works fine for me. however, wanted to check if there is any way we can show ony the top 5 bloggers in this. Currently the way this works is that it displays all the bloggers and number of posts by each. I was looking at something which displays only top 5 bloggers
Hello i get an error that says :
Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator.
This error is on both the Tag Cloud Web Part & the Top Posters Web Part. Any Ideas?