I recently created a custom SharePoint Framework (SPFx) web part that had some text fields in the property pane with character limits. I wanted the page authors to have some feedback as they typed so they knew how many characters were left, so I used the description property with some string concatenation to make it…
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…
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,…
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…
About a year ago I started writing JavaScript functions to perform batch tasks on SharePoint lists using SPServices. I did this because SharePoint didn’t offer the functionality I needed out of the box, and I’m limited to SharePoint Designer for all development at my workplace. After writing several of these functions for one-off projects (mostly…
As part of a website redesign communication campaign, I was tasked with developing a web-based crossword puzzle for our intranet site (MOSS 2007). After some brainstorming I came up with a solution that seems to be effective and relatively easy to set up using a custom list to store the answers, some jQuery to enhance…
CSS Naked Day is tomorrow, April 9th. Being an advocate of web standards, I think this is a very cool (albeit not well-known) event. You can read more about it at http://naked.threepixeldrift.com/. I wanted to participate this year, but the only WordPress plugin for CSS Naked Day I could find was several years out-of-date (and therefore…
My SimpleMaxChars jQuery plugin adds a message displaying the number of characters remaining in an <input> or <textarea>. I needed a fairly basic solution quickly and most of the existing plugins that offer similar functionality were too big, too small, buggy, or didn’t meet my specific needs. If this looks like it will work for…