Site Themes vs. Publishing Infrastructure = Publishing Wins!!

Issue: After enabling publishing on a team site, user is no longer able to change site themes.


Cause: When publishing is turned on, the subsite inherits the master page from the top level site. This overrides the theme. The subsite is set to inherit. The subsite is stuck with the master page and the theme is rendered unchangeable.

Solution:

1. Open site in SharePoint Designer and open the Catalogues > Master page section in the folder list.
2. Right click on the master page that you want to inherit from the main site (it will probably be default.master)
3. Select Set as Default Master Page
4. If you recieve a warning message, click OK
5. Navigate back to the site and refresh the page
6. Go to your Site Settings page and choose a new theme. Click OK
7. Navigate back to your page and refresh.

You should be showing the desired theme.

NOTE: If you have turned off publishing, you will need to turn it back on for the changes to take place. If you have turned it off before step 1 above, you will not get any result after completing step 7.

Publishing Sites and Version History

One of the users at the company where I work accidently published a version of her page that she actually wanted to hold off on for a week or so. She figured that she would simply revert back to a previously published version of the page and then she could take her time rolling that page out. However, when she reverted back to a previous version, she discovered that the reverted page looked exactly like the new page that she did not want to publish. The reason? Because the changes she made involved deleting and adding web parts to the page and no actual page content changes occured.

Unfortunately, SharePoint publishing page versions do not keep track of new or deleted web parts. If you add or delete web parts, those changes will be pervasive throughout the versions once that page is published.

While there was nothing that could be done about the web parts that were deleted, she chose to close the web parts she had created until she wanted them to display.

Site Master vs System Master - Great Blog From Joel Oleson

I was asked by a colleague the other day what the difference was between the System Master and Site Master page. Not being an expert in Sharepoint Design, I really couldn't answer her. Today, while searching for something else entirely, I came across a blog by Joel Oleson that explained this very well.

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/04/12/master-page-and-themes-on-wss-sites-in-moss.aspx

Hope you enjoy!

Changing the .DOC template in your Document Library

When you create a document library, if you accept all the defaults at the time of creation, you will be stuck with a template.doc format. This means that whenever a user clicks on the "New" button to create a document in the library, they will get a Word 2003 template. This is fine if most of your audience for your library is still on Windows 2003. However, if most of your organization is using Windows 2007, you may want the .docx format to be the default.


If that is the case, you can do this very easily by going to Settings à Document Library Settings à Advanced Settings. There will be a section for Document Template. At the end of the URL in that section’s text box (it will look something like “YourDocumentLibrary/Forms/template.doc”), just type an “x” at the end of template.doc. Click Save and navigate back to your library. You will notice the Icon has changed from the old version of Word to the new one.

Setting Default view to Monthly in My Outlook Calendar

My company recently updated our Exchange to 2007. Great - right? Well, for the most part, yes. However one thing that we noticed right away is that the functionality for the My Calendar web part changed for our My Sites.

In the past we were able to modify the default view of the My Calendar web part to a daily, weekly or monthly view. However, since the upgrade, we are no longer getting the option for monthly. After searching forever for a solution to this issue, I was stumped And then I read that the new version of Exchange did not support monthly views for OWA. Since OWA runs this web part, it would make sense that it was not displaying. (By the way, SP1 fixes this issue for OWA, but not for the SharePoint web part.)

In any case, we found that when we wanted to switch to a monthly view we still could (there is a handy button on the toolbar for this). However, we could not make this our default view. As you can see from the screen shot, there are only two options, and neither is monthly.So we had to find a workaround.

In the Mail Server Address section, add the name of your mail server address as usual. In the mailbox, use your regular mailbox address (yourname@yourcompany.com, for example and add to it the following string:

/?cmd=contents&part=1&module=calendar&view=monthly#

Once you do this, click OK and you will have your web part once again displaying a default view of monthly.

NOTE - On my site, I had to resize the calendar to get it to display. I left the width alone, but modified the height of the web part to 600 pixels and that seemed to work nicely.