Innovation Matters

Essays on AI, developer tools, and thoughtful software.

  • Provisioning subclassed Content Query Web Part using Gary Lapointe’s setwebpartstate stsadm command

    Stsadm is highly extensible and Gary Lapointe is one of the guys who could tell you everything about it. In order to support the deployment and administration of SharePoint solutions, Gary has created more than 130 custom STSADM commands. One of them – setwebpartstate has recently took my attention. I kept getting errors while importing a subclassed Content Query Web Part (CQWP) – until now…

  • Optimize your images and save the bits for later

    There are many different ways of optimizing the performance of your website. While many developers tend to look for the troubles inside their code, there are some things that designers can do to make a website load faster.

  • Localizing Content Query Web Part XSL templates

    It’s great to know that the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is there whenever you need to provide a roll up of some content. Delivering a solution of similar experience, possibilities and flexibility would be really time consuming. Unfortunately there are still some things inside the CQWP which could be improved. Let’s take for example localizing the XSL used for data presentation: do we really have to create a different template for every language or is there a better way?

  • Alternative display order in Content Query Web Part

    Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is a great solution for content aggregation: not only thanks to its high performance but to the XSLT-based output rendering as well. And while XSLT is very powerful, many beginning SharePoint developers experience it as an obstacle and are more likely to provide custom aggregation solutions instead of using the standard components provided with SharePoint. In this article you will find out how you can alter the standard display order of the aggregated content using nothing more than the standard Content Query Web Part and a little bit of XSLT.