Interface Enhancements on EndUserSharePoint.com

As I continue to refine the interface for the “New and Improved” EndUserSharePoint.com, I’d like to point out a few enhancement to make your stay here a little more pleasant.

Monthly Archives

The most apparent difference is in the Monthly Archives Panel in the right sidebar. It is now very easy to access the archives of all of the articles on the site. They are arranged by month. Clicking on a month will show a list of all articles in that month. Christophe Humbert from Path to SharePoint has requested that I also include a page with all articles on one page for easy searching. I’ll be working on that over the next week.

Flyout Menus

A not so apparent enhancement is the use of dropdown and flyout menus in the navigation bar at the top of the page. Mouseover the “Topics” button in the navigation bar and a dropdown menu of main topics will appear. The first one is “Author”, where you can choose to view all articles by a specific author. For people who have written one or two articles for me, you can find their name under “Author -> Guest Post”. Until I created that menu I really hadn’t realized how many people have contributed to the site. It’s very exciting.

Social Media Network Buttons

Twitter and Facebook have become ubiqitous as social media distribution outlets. I have included a button bar in the righthand column where you can now link to any of the major social networks with a single click. I also added the ability to print, email or “Favorite” an article. Every page and article on the site includes this menu to help you manage the articles you find useful on the site.

Featured Articles Slider

The Featured Articles Slider at the top of the page is an experiment in exposing content that I feel will be beneficial or interesting when people first enter the site. As we publish new articles, the content in that box will change. That’s a new concept, so I’d like your feedback on how effective it is and what type of content you’d like to see in there.

Comment Subscriptions

Following the discussion on an article where you haven’t left a comment is hard to do with out-of-the-box WordPress. I’ve added the capability to “subscribe” to an article’s comments just as a “lurker”. You will then be notified by email whenever there is a new comment.

jQuery Script Displays

jQuery has become a huge topic here, so we have refined how scripts are displayed. We’ve upgraded the script display to include a menu in the top right corner of each script to give more functionality for viewing and copying. Here… mouseover the short script below and test out the menu items. My favorite is the second icon that places the script into your clipboard. Very nice work by Alex Gorbatchev.

<!--

Author: Mark Miller, Founder and Editor, EndUserSharePoint.com
Original Creation Date: 2009-01-28
Last Modified: 2009-01-28

Special thanks to Todd Bleeker at MindSharp for the original idea.

For a list of many other objects that can be manipulated at the client level, view Heather Solomon's CSS Reference Chart for SharePoint 2007: http://www.heathersolomon.com/content/sp07cssreference.htm 

USAGE:
By default, all components of the Quick Launch are visible. By changing the display type from 'block' to 'none', specific areas of the interface can be turned on and off.

As an example, setting the .ms-quicklaunchheader to 'display:none', will hide the display of the 'View All Site Content' header.

-->

<style>

.ms-globalbreadcrumb {
  display: none;
}

.ms-pagetitleareaframe {
  display: none;
}

.ms-globaltitlearea {
  display: none;
}

.ms-listheaderlabel {
  display: none;
}

.ms-viewselector {
  display: none;
}

.ms-viewselectorhover {
  display: none;
}

.ms-listdescription {
  display: none;
}

.ms-menubuttonactive {
  display: none;
}

.ms-menubuttonactivehover {
  display: none;
}

<!-- Entire quick launch bar, including the space it resides in -->
.ms-leftareacell, .ms-titlearealeft {
  display: none;
}

</style>

Extended Definitions, Footnotes and Comments

Sometimes it is nice to include extend comments on a topic but we want to include it inline, not as a link to another page or article. We now have the ability to include include, slidedown content blocks for short comments like that. Here, checkout the Short Speaker Bio» I include when I going to speak at various conferences. This is done with the Sliding Notes plugin for WordPress from Hackadelic. If this works out well, I might even use it to hide/expose the scripting examples. Feedback on that one?

Platform

For the content management geeks among you, I am using WordPress with a raft of plugins to make all this work. The site is hosted on RackSpace.

Conclusion

I hope you find the new interface is a little more intuitive to get a round. There is so much content here now I definitely needed a better way to expose the information. Lot’s more on the way, including a brand new incarnation of Stump the Panel: SharePoint Q&A Forum. Stay tuned…

Regards,
Mark

Mark Miller, Founder and Editor
EndUserSharePoint.com