SharePoint Simple CMS: 2007 Template
A note from Mark Miller: Several months ago, Jose Antonio Morales and I had lunch in New York City. My 5 year old daughter played games on Jose’s iPad while we discussed his new projects and his pending move to NYC. Part of the discussion centered around a site template he was creating for content management in SharePoint. I was intrigued.
Jose has completed phase one of the project and is making the template available as an exclusive download for EndUserSharePoint.com Weekly Newsletter subscribers. Make sure you’re registered for the newsletter (top right corner of this page) and you’ll have access to download the template the first time you receive the newsletter. Please leave him suggestions and comments below.
History: Why we designed SharePoint Simple CMS
I started with SharePoint since the times of Microsoft BCentral. Even though hosted SharePoint was meant for team collaboration, I made all possible efforts to make it accessible for anonymous users. The potential was huge.
Years later with WSS 2 the possibilities grew and I decided there is no reason to stick with SharePoint’s out of the box design. My team at B4Contact achieved a partial success enabling IE6 compatible Web sites that looked great and looked nothing like WSS; the problem was that editing contents would require the user to switch to a different interface and the goal was to edit contents on the same design page.
WSS 3 was the right opportunity and SharePoint Simple CMS was born. At that point B4Contact hosted SharePoint sites for 10-15% of schools in Slovenia, 60 micro businesses and 30 to 40 SMBs.
An important problem was that my customers started using Firefox and the SP rich text editor would work only with IE. At that point we decided to use TinyMCE for rich text editing.
We designed SharePoint Simple CMS because working with SharePoint is easy and our target was always small organizations looking for simple solutions that empower them to edit their Web sites. SharePoint helps the creative process and is flexible enough as a platform for customization.
We discovered in the process…
We are still in the process. I would not say that SharePoint Simple CMS is in its final shape and the business model still needs to be improved. Along the wayt, many things were discovered:
- Final users really care little about SharePoint. Therefore we get more visibility from SharePoint experts than potential users and that is not necessarily a good thing.
- SMBs and small organizations are ready to pay for solutions that look as good as they wish.
- Communicating value is a tricky business. The strategy needed to offer SharePoint solutions to final users starts on the experience and ends on the experience, not on SharePoint.
About me
Jose Antonio Morales
Born peruvian, currently in Slovenia and heading to NY. Father of 2 and husband of 1.
The relationship between technology and human development fascinates me. I’m a born entrepreneur and started early with IT. My first encounter was with an Atari 800XL and my latest gadget is an iPad. Organized and participated in many events, the latest being the SharePoint Conference in Peru.
on
Very interesting approach. Now, how can I edit the site logo so that I can add our corporate logo?
Grace
Hi, if you go to the Intranet link you will find the traditional SharePoint interface. There you can find that the banner image is stored on a picture gallery. Just replace the file respecting the same size
Great work my fellow Peruvian.
Looks like it could be reallly useful. Are there any instructions on how I can customize it? I can try to reverse engineer it, but I’d love to avoid that.
In particular….
Best ways to:
1 Change the header image,
2. Add/Edit/Remove Menu Items (Home, Products, Services, etc…) and sub menus.
3. How to edit the content. Can I add rich text to the text boxes? Where is the text stored?
4. How is the jQuery library used?
Hi,
You will find on the upper side of the page a link saying Site structure, there you can add more pages, edit the current pages and even add a second level of navigation.
You can go to the Intranet link to see where the information is stored. There you will find out also that the JS and some other important files are located in document libraries so you could access them using the browser. The image banner can be replaced from the existing picture gallery as well.
The site design is based on CSS so you can modify the looks as you please.
The editor we are using there is TinyMCE, you can customize it as you please. The current version is supporting rich text but we included only the controls that are most useful.
I’ll get in touch with Jose and get some documentation posted. In the meantime, if you’re the site admin, poke around the links at the very top of the page. There’s a new kind of admin built into this template. Let me know what you think. — Mark
This is cool. Data structure design is easy for me, but website design regarding CSS and such is hard for me. I’m going to play with it for a bit and post some more.
Excellent work by Jose!!!
I have few questions though.
1- How can you create a link for a document library file that exists in the same site? I tried it but it doesn’t work. You can create a link to an external site but not to an existing document library file. In my case if I am going to use Simple CMS, I should be able to leverage SharePoint’s out of the box functionality such as creating a link to an existing document library file etc…
2- Also it is not straight forward as to how you can use the social networking function. I edited the Twitter feature and put in my Twitter URL but nothing happened.
Perhaps getting a documentation might be a very good idea.
Sincerely
I am taking back my second question as I now figured it out how it works.
Hi, thanks for the feedback.
We could easily add a cistum field that gets meta data directly from a document library.
Maybe use a relative link, for example /doclib/text.doc
Please let me know if that works.
Hi,
We are very interested in this template however we are in the process of migrating to SP2010 and wonder if this template is compatible. Can it be installed directly to SP2010 environment?
It is not currently developed for Sp 2010. It will not work.
But transforming it to be compatibleness not a hard work. Stay tuned because soon will be released a version that works fine with SP 2010
Cool!
Do you have a timeframe as we have a number of SP 2010 projects that could really benefit from this template.
Thank you for the groundwork on this as I think you will see a significant increase in the uptake of WSS3.0 and Sharepoint foundation for public facing websites.
:-)
Do you have this template packaged into a solution file for those of us on SharePoint 2010?
Hi, I’m one step left from trying this template on my environment but I have a single question before :
Is it possible that this template can be used only on sharepoint environments that are set up in english ?
I have a French WSS environment and I can’t chose this template although the .stp file is correctly stored in the site template gallery. I have only one collection site.
Thank you !
You are right, this template is made using the English SharePoint site.
Would you be interested in localizing it?
Hi !
It could be a good idea indeed. Would you want to tell me some more information about this at rdalle-at-gmail-dot-com ?
See you later.
Congrats Jose, great job! ;)
Agnes of our heart!
Nice you like it! You should become a ShaPoint Simple CMS partner for Hungary!
This is a very nice template!
Thanks George! Any question, feedback will be welcome.
1. Do I need to download TinyMCE to use this template? The TinyMCE site tells me it is a javascript WYSIWYG editor, so I’m guessing you already have it embedded in the site and I don’t need to do anything but click on “Show Controls” to see the TinyMCE editing capabilities.
2. I can’t find any way to edit the Home paragraph. The edit control only lets me add to it, not replace it, and there is no article entitled “Home” in the content list. What am I missing?
Hi Keith,
You can edit the main paragraph from each page usingnthe Site Structure link. If you edit the page from there you will see the text you need to change.
If I got your question wrong don’t doubt posting here a message.
Thank you for the hint. Its very easy to do once you know where to look to edit each control.
Feedback: If I remove all the social networking options, the “You can find us here” label still shows. Does everyone want to use social networking?
Very nice template Jose!
Just wanted to provide feedback since I encountered an issue while trying to edit content from the home page. I clicked Show Controls and indeed, the controls for the content were shown. But when I tried to edit content for the “Why do we use it?” column and tried to save it, it didn’t work. Idt did work editing from the content list via intranet.
Still, this is a great template!
Thanks Manu, I wil, try to reproduce the problem. If that’s a bug be sure I will come back with the solution :)
Thanks!
Hello Jose,
I uploaded your .stp to the site collection template, but when i go to create the new site, it doesn’t show up under the “Custom” tab.
Thanks,
Hello Jose,
I am able to make it work on a 32 bit Windows XP workstation. It didn’t work when I performed the same step on Windows 7 64 bit. Weird and not making any sense but it is what it is. The template is GREAT!
I am planning to use it for intranet and would like to ask for method to hide “controls” on the top of the page. Thanks again!
I’m not sure what’s really the issue. Where do you have your SP installed? Is the issue browsing?
Regarding the code or methods. All the code, scripts and CSS are available if you open the site with SharePoint Designer.
Hi HN, aré you using SharePoint in English?
Hello Jose,
Yes. I am using English 1033 and I load the template in an intranet collaboration portal. I would like to know how I can hide the top four links from users with read access.
Is it possible for me to modify CSS and increase the width to 1024 or 1280?
I do appreciate your assistance as I am trying to load this template for a school in another country (I was running out of luck on Friday until I saw the email from Mark with your post). My email is cmdr (at) live (dot) com. Thanks again.
Looks really nice. How will I manage new versions? Is there a good way for me to preserve my customizations and upgrade to your newer versions as your develop them?
Hi Marcel, that’s a very good question.
It all depends on the new version. I can tell you that in most cases the changes are part of CSS, scripts and master pages. If you have a site deployed with information you can update only those files and the changes will be applied without any problem.
If you modify the , as part of your customization, the master page, CSS or scripts then you will have to manage versioning in order to identify which is the custom code you will need to add to the new version.
I hope that answers your question.
Hi,
If I remember correctly with CSS there is ways of overriding previous CSS by placing other CSS later in the file or in a seperate file and have that file loaded earlier. As a result you could place all your cutomizations at the end of the template files or in seperate files and modify the template to load them.
HTH
Mat
AGain,
I can’t stress enough how elegant this work is. As I play, I came accross this common issue with SharePoint, and maybe you have an answer.
I would like to use the inbox so that people can ask me to contact them. That being said, I want to make sure the list is locked so people can anonymously add a request for contact, but no see anyone’s information.
It seems when I try to set the permission so that a user can only see their own infomation, then it does not permit anonymous access. ANy thoughts on how to accomplish this?
Also, If I want to add some other fields in the contact us, for example a drop down with topics etc…
Any suggestions on how to do that?
Thanks for your kind words Marcel.
Yes there is a way to do that. You can use the securitytrim control on the Default.master in order to not let anonymous users to see anything.
That means that the inbox is invisible, the correct URLl would show a blank page.
Thanks to Robert I can share how the code looks
Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl runat=”server” PermissionsString=”DeleteListItems”>
That would be great! I would really love that.
Also, is there any way to add a Captcha control to verify that a human is entering data?
If I add new columns to the underlying list (In this case Inbox) can I add a control to allow people to provide answers? So in general, if I want to add a new list and expose a form for new/edit, how do I do this?
Finally, is there a simple way to implement cascading controls:
e.g.
Create a form wityh three drop downs:
Step 1 – Region of Country: Pick from North East, Mid Atlantic, Etc…
Step 2 – State: Shows only the states available that exist in the region pciked in Step 1.
Step 3 – City: Show only the cities available in the State that is picked in Step 2.
Hi Marcel, what I can say is that yes. It is possible.
You can have fields that are visible to the user and fields that not. That could help you for example to manage a workflow.
But definitively the answer is not so simple as to write it here. Robert is the expert on the topic and I will discuss with him about making some videos.
His Twitter account: http://twitter.com/robertkuzma
Looks cool! But I could not get it to load. I uploaded in my site gallery but do not see it in my custom site tab. Also tried stsadm and it said could not find or parse web template file. any suggestions?
Hi Sean,
AS much as I understand, this template can only be used with an english setup of WSS or MOSS. My SharePoint environment is not in English and I can’t see the template in the custom tab.
Thanks Romain.
The funny thing is I am running WSS 3.0 in English. It is strange. I would very much so like to see this in action.
Hi Sean,
This is what I use to add the template
stsadm -o addtemplate -filename c:\NAME.stp
then you need to restart IIS
Other way is to add the template to the SIte gallery of any site collection. Then you can create sub sites using SharePoint Simple CMS.
Thank you Jose!,
Still no luck tho. I used stsadm command and get “Cannot find or parse c:\temp\SharePointSimpleCMS.stp”
Has anyone else had this problem?
I had the same problem, and had the same error message “Cannot find or parse c:\temp\SharePointSimpleCMS.stp”
Jose,
Thank you for this template. I am going to give it a go in a test bed and see if I can add any constructive feedback to help you into the next phase of your development.
Until then, I wish you the best.
Cheers,
Jeremy
Hi Jose,
I uploaded your .stp to the site collection template, but when i go to create the new site, it doesn’t show up under the “Custom” tab. My MOSS 2007 is installed in Windows Server 2008. how to make it work?
thanks!
Lawrence Yi
Hi Lawrence, is your SharePoint in English?
Yes, It is in english.
I do noticed that after the .stp is uploaded into the site template gallery, the languange filed of the file is empty.
thanks!
Lawrence
Exellent work, Jose! Just brilliant!
Thanks for posting.
I’m glad you like it Jim!
would be interesting to see if the community would create more things on top of it.