SharePoint 2010 - Creating a custom ribbon button/s to be displayed only in the calendar view ribbon.

Before I start, this is not an original blog! I used this fantastic four-part blog from Chris O'Brien (http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2010/01/customizing-ribbon-part-1-creating-tabs.html) to learn how to create a custom ribbon control. Then all I wanted to do was make my group only appear for the calendar view ribbon, so I thought I'd just share how to do that in case someone is after the same thing and wants a quick solution. All credits on the code used go to Chris O'Brien, I just altered it for my needs.

See the code below...

I've highlighted three important groups...

1. Grey - This shows that all of my IDs start with BM.SharePoint.Ribbon.NewGroupInExistingTab. This isn't coincidence, it's important to ensure that the ribbon group even shows in the first place. Without this consistency it will not show!
2. Yellow - here is what you came for :-) this is how to get a group of buttons into just the Calendar's "Events" tab. If you wanted it in the "Calendar" tab, you'd replace the word "Events" with "Calendar" in all of the yellow highlighted bits
3. Aqua blue - The "Command" attribute in the "Button" declaration must be the same as the "Command" attribute in the respective CommandUIHandler section! Otherwise the buttons will do nothing when you click them.

Enjoy ^_^

Upgrading SharePoint 2007 Page Layouts when migrating to 2010

It's blog number two! This is a dev one. I'm not going to tell you what code changes are needed to update 2007 page layouts to 2010, I'm going to address the less covered but more annoying issue of how do I get these new page layouts into the 2010 environment?

Before you read on, I'm going to assume that you were not using the standard MOSS page layouts, "defaultLayout.aspx", "searchmain.aspx" etc, and that you were creating your own custom ones (you better not have customised the default ones!).

Sounds easy, well you just upload them! If you upload them how are you going to associate every page with every new layout? There is a way to do that and it's documented here, just wrap the layouts into a feature to automatically upload them, or upload them manually, then use this code (adapted to your environment) to update all pages to use the new page layouts (http://sharepointers.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmatically-update-page-layouts.html). Nice idea I think! But the only issue with it is, we're trying to do the migration from 2007 to 2010 in a weekend, this process took about 8 hours to update all of our pages and we have about 200GB of content which I'd say is pretty small.

So there is another way. First of all you will want to create your upgraded page layouts. Then you should put them into a feature in Visual Studio 2010. These steps you should know how to do, but if not, just create a new feature, then create a new module, add your new page layouts into the module, then in the elements.xml file add in a module to upload them one by one into the master page gallery, sample xml code below (I'm being brief because this isn't the point of this blog)...

<Module Name="CompanyABC.PageLayouts" Url="_catalogs/masterpage">

      <File Path="CompanyABC.PageLayouts\CompanyABC-AdvancedSearchLayoutv4.aspx" Url="CompanyABC-AdvancedSearchLayoutv4.aspx" Type="GhostableInLibrary">

        <Property Name="Title" Value="CompanyABC - Search - Advanced v4"/>

        <Property Name="ContentType" Value="Welcome Page"/>

        <Property Name="PublishingPreviewImage" Value="~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/Preview Images/CompanyABC-ContentOnly.jpg, ~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/Preview Images/CompanyABC-AdvancedSearchLayout.jpg" />

        <Property Name="Description" Value="This is the advanced search page for the CompanyABC intranet search area v4."/>

        <Property Name="PublishingAssociatedContentType" Value=";#Welcome Page;#0x010100C568DB52D9D0A14D9B2FDCC96666E9F2007948130EC3DB064584E219954237AF390064DEA0F50FC8C147B0B6EA0636C4A7D4;#" />

      </File>

</Module>

Ok so here's the magic part. SharePoint won't let you copy over the top of something because it complains that the page layout has a load of associations therefore it can't be overwritten... but what you can do, is upload all of your new page layouts with a slight adjustment to the file name (e.g. "v4" as I've done), then simply rename them to be the same as the old ones! It works! So, we did this with a feature reciever...

public override void FeatureActivated(SPFeatureReceiverProperties properties)

        {

            // Move new Page Layouts to replace old 2007 ones

            SPSite thisSite = (SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent;

            using (SPWeb thisWeb = thisSite.RootWeb)

            {                

                ArrayList pageLayoutOldAndNew = new ArrayList();

                string[] pair = new string[2];

                // Format: Page Layout original, new version

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-AdvancedSearchLayout.aspx", "CompanyABC-AdvancedSearchLayoutv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-Article.aspx", "CompanyABC-Articlev4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-ContentOnlyFullWidth.aspx", "CompanyABC-ContentOnlyFullWidthv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-ContentOnly.aspx", "CompanyABC-ContentOnlyv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-Dashboard.aspx", "CompanyABC-Dashboardv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-Home-Subsites.aspx", "CompanyABC-Home-Subsitesv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-Home.aspx", "CompanyABC-Homev4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-PeopleResults.aspx", "CompanyABC-PeopleResultsv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-SearchMain.aspx", "CompanyABC-SearchMainv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-SearchResults.aspx", "CompanyABC-SearchResultsv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-ZonesContentFullWidth.aspx", "CompanyABC-ZonesContentFullWidthv4.aspx" });

                pageLayoutOldAndNew.Add(new string[2] { "CompanyABC-ZonesContent.aspx", "CompanyABC-ZonesContentv4.aspx" });

                SPFolder masterPages = thisWeb.GetFolder("/_catalogs/masterpage/");

                if (masterPages.Exists)

                {

                    for (int pag = 0; pag < masterPages.Files.Count; pag++)

                    {

                        SPFile thisFile = masterPages.Files[pag];

                        foreach (string[] _pair in pageLayoutOldAndNew)

                        {

                            if (thisFile.Name.ToLower().Equals(_pair[0].ToLower()))

                            {

                                if (web.GetFile("/_catalogs/masterpage/" + _pair[1]).Exists == true)

                                {

                                    web.GetFile("/_catalogs/masterpage/" + _pair[1]).MoveTo("/_catalogs/masterpage/" + _pair[0], true);

                                }

                            }

                        }

                    }

                }

            }

        }

Then with this feature activated on the top level web for the site collection, this will update all the page layouts and will only take a few seconds to run, enjoy!