Waldek Mastykarz - Innovation Matters | SharePoint Server MVP | ISSN 2210-9390

One of the great improvements in SharePoint 2010 are Web Templates. Mirjam van Olst wrote recently a great article about why using light-weight Web Templates is a better approach than using full blown Site Definitions. While using Web Templates for creating sites and Site Collections is pretty straight-forward things get complicated when you need to create the Site Collection programmatically. Read more »

Proper usage of headings is very important on the web. It helps you structure your content making it more readable, it makes it easier for visually challenged readers to navigate through the content and helps you optimize your content for search engines. And while it’s so important, it’s quite surprising that there is no standard mechanism available within SharePoint that would allow you to quickly verify that your page has a valid headings structure. However thanks to the great extensibility of SharePoint it’s history: proudly presenting Mavention Scan Page Headings! Read more »

Earlier this year Yoast wrote an interesting article about how including a Table of Contents (TOC) for longer articles can help you drive traffic to your content from search engines. While there are some plugins available for other Content Management Systems, that help you with generating TOC for your pages, if your website is hosted on SharePoint, you still have to insert the Table of Contents manually. At least you had to, because now you can do this automatically using the Mavention Insert Table of Contents solution. Read more »

While working on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 Web Content Management (WCM) Solutions you might have relied on the fact that the name of the Pages Library was always Pages. Well almost always, because in some languages, like German, it was translated along with the Title. Given that fact, changed the way we had to deal with the Pages Library in code. Instead of hard coding the URL part of the Pages Library, all of a sudden we had to retrieve it dynamically, just because someone accidentally translated the URL of the Pages Library. But looking at SharePoint Server 2010 tells us otherwise. Now the URL parts of Pages Libraries in all languages are translated. So was it a mistake in MOSS 2007 that in German the Pages Library was called Seiten or was it a mistake that the Dutch one was called Pages instead of Paginas? Read more »

Recently, during my SharePoint 2010 Web Content Management session at DIWUG, I demoed new editing capabilities of SharePoint 2010. During the demo I used a custom feature to quickly insert dummy text. As I got quite a few questions about it, I decided to publish the solution. Proudly presenting: Mavention Insert Lorem Ipsum. Read more »