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/

I promise; this one is short.

You know how tough it can be to customize/brand a SharePoint site to your corporate marketing schemes I am sure. Well, I just wanted to share a couple of things with you to make it a little easier next time.

First, if you want to move that Wiki page menu bar (the one with the Edit and History buttons) around on the page, you need to deal with that MiniConsole component on your master page. Really, that's it for the first thing.

Second, READ! Specifically, read everything you can find time to read on Heather Solomon's site. Then read all the CSS books and blogs you can. I assure you it will save you tons of time when you start the next SharePoint branding project.

On a side note, if you aren't using Wikies in SharePoint, you really should give them a shot. They are about the easiest and best way to get your organization's tacit knowledge saved for future employees. This makes turnover of key people much less of an issue. It also helps with the adoption of SharePoint sites in the company. And trust me, the younger generation of workers you are hiring now, they KNOW about Wikies and they will be looking for yours. Make sure they can find it.