I recently took on the role of maintaining SharePoint Solutions' Resource Portal. Historically, the Resource Portal's content has primarily been in the form of Portal Area Listings. If you haven't visited our Resource Portal recently, please take a look and feel free to send me your comments. It's a work in progress, and I need some help with the artsy stuff.
From a content perspective, I wanted to give the portal a more dynamic "Blog like" look and feel, and roll-up SubArea Listings with RSS syndicated feeds. For performance reasons, I also felt it was important to have controls for caching both the displayed roll-up and the RSS Feed. Although I was able to find freely downloadable solutions that provide RSS syndication of WSS Lists, I couldn't seem to find anything for rolling-up and syndicating Portal Area Listings.
As a result, I went ahead and threw together a little web part to handle the task. An online demonstration of the Area Listings Rollup web part can be found on the home page of our Resource Portal.
The web part has four display styles: Full, Simple, Headlines, and Alphabetical Headlines. The Full style (shown top right) provides the most details, displaying links to the Po
rtal Listing's parent Area, the Portal Listing author's My Site, and of course the listing itself. The most compact style is Headlines, displaying only links to the Portal Listings. In each of the display styles, an image linking to the Area Listing Rollup's RSS Syndicated feed is diplayed in the bottom left corner (not shown).
In addition to setting the display style, web part caching is also configurable from the tool pane, and the RSS image link can optionally be hidden from view.
That's about it. You can get the bits for the Area Listings Rollup Web Part here, or from the Downloads Area over on our Resource Portal.
We also have some public community forums at forums.sharepointsolutions.com, and for SharePoint training visit www.sharepointsolutions.com.
14 comments:
Great solution.
csegura
Nice!
I have been looking for a web part to use as an alternative to the standard Listings webpart, in order to show other fields such as date and author. So far your listings on the Resource Portal look great. The fact your web part also implements RSS just happens to be a bonus!
Judging by the info/screenshots it seems I could 'hide' the RSS feed if desired and use this as a direct replacement for the "Grouped Listings" webpart, anybody any suggestions as to why this wouldn't be the case?
One consideration, do any of the Listings Rollup display styles show the image associated with a listing alongside the Description? Or is it only the Listing icon that is displayed?
Many Thanks,
S.
Seems interesting ! Can you webpart show "expired news" - and overcome the fact that expired news listings is hidden from non-admin users? - even from a view from _layouts/1030/lstman.aspx , Is a public "old news" archive impossible to make??
Does the rollup only support up to 12 items?
Regards - René
Hi Rene,
I'll to look into your "expired news" idea, and determine if can be done in a future release. Thanks for the good suggestion.
Regarding your other question; yes the Area Listings Rollup web part is currently hard-coded to display tweleve items maximum. This could easily be changed to a variable user setting in a future release.
Hi sebt81,
This version of the Area Listings Rollup web part doesn't display the area listing's associated image. Definitely a good idea for a future release.
After some testing I notice that the webpart displays Listings that are archived/unapproved/rejected, rather than just current approved listings.
Is this by design or is it something you would expect to address in a future release?
Regards,
S.
I really like the solution, but I can't get RSS to display correctly. Feedreader keeps telling me I need to authenticate but doesn't accept my domain creds. Am I doing something wrong?
Very Nice!!!!!
Does this require SP2?
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