I have tried my best to avoid JavaScript as much as possible. Primarily, it is because it just looks too much like C and C++ (YIKES!). Yes, I LOVE VB. Anyway, over the last couple of weeks I was introduced to the YUI (Yahoo User Interface) tools/libraries. This toolset is simply incredibel. What's more, is this stuff can be rather easily retrofitted into your SharePoint Layout Pages to do some REALLY cool stuff.

Today, we (by we, I mean I watched as some User Interface guys worked) implemented the Panel and animation libraries. Literally in a matter of about 2 hours, we had a rocking fly-out set of web parts. All we had to do was copy/paste in some of the YUI tags and point them to our DIV wrapped around the web part zone hosting our webparts. In our case, this was just the Right web part zone. So, now there is this awesome little tab sitting over on the right of the screen that when you click it, it slides out to the left with all the web parts there. Talk about a real-estate saver. Let me repeat the best part - 2 HOURS! That was it.

I am sure we (spoken lightly) will spend a little more time tweaking the CSS to style that panel, but for the most part, the YUI took care of everything for us. You HAVE to check it out!

http://developer.yahoo.com/