SharePoint 2013’s Callouts are used frequently throughout its UI to display contextual information. They also happen to be a great tool for creating in-page tours to guide users through learning about key features on a page. The first time I encountered one of these “tours” was after a Facebook redesign several years ago. Of course,…
When editing pages in SharePoint, the rich text editor inserts zero-width spaces to assist with text selection. Unfortunately it does not always remove these when a page is saved. These characters appear as ​ in Chrome’s dev tools, for example. These “leftovers” can cause spacing issues for content authors, so we created a bookmarklet to…
I’m using SharePoint’s built-in modal dialog for a single page application I’ve been developing. When I refresh the page to test changes I’ll randomly get an error saying that “Cannot read property ‘STS’ of undefined.” I’m using the Script-on-demand functions that should make things work: SP.SOD.executeFunc(‘sp.ui.dialog.js’, ‘SP.UI.ModalDialog’, myFunction); Looking at the stack trace, I can…
I’m working on a project where I need to grab the contents of a Page Layout HTML file on a publishing site via JavaScript. The obvious solution would be to use a GET request via AJAX (I’m using jQuery here). The file contents are plain text with no binary data, so it should be a…
SharePoint 2013’s corev15.css file comes with a bunch of useful CSS classes. It doesn’t compare to something like Zurb Foundation or Bootstrap, but there’s enough in there to allow you to write less CSS for your custom apps. It’s also a great way to ensure that your app blends in with the SharePoint UI for a more consistent…
My employer, Apollo Education Group, published our 2013 Corporate Social Responsibility Annual Report in February of this year. The project, like our 2012 report, was a fantastic team effort and fun project for me personally. From a web development perspective, my team added a lot of tools and techniques to our repertoire during this project,…
This is a trick I hadn’t used in a couple of years until just the other day. You can create a hyperlink to a specific page in a PDF by appending #page=3 to the URL. For example, if I want to link to page 35 of “SharePoint-Magazine-Issue-2.pdf” on my website, the link would be http://joshmccarty.com/…
One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2013 was to redesign my personal website. It didn’t happen. I think most web developers tend to neglect their personal site a bit because they are always working on other projects. At least that seems to be the consensus with my coworkers. Well, it’s still pretty rough around the…
I contributed a chapter to the book Black Magic Solutions for White Hat SharePoint which is now available on Amazon. The book was organized by Mark Miller and includes chapters from several SharePoint community members. Mark’s goal was to break away from the traditional publishing model and self-publish an ebook in just a few months. You…
Quite often I find myself needing to use a server variable in a SharePoint data view web part. These are very useful for getting information that would otherwise not be available to use in a DVWP. There are several resources that explain how to use server variables, so check those out if you haven’t used…