Share Point Designer 2010 Best Practices
Introduction
SharePoint Designer 2010 is the premier tool to configure and customize SharePoint 2010. This document will help you to identify those situations where SPD can be helpful and identify situations where using SPD may be more of a hindrance than a help.
Before going through this Blog couple of things we need to keep in mind:
1. Only SharePoint sites can be managed and customized in SharePoint Designer 2010.
2. SharePoint Designer 2010 is not backwards compatible and cannot be used to open sites in SharePoint 2007 or earlier products.
If you are familiar about SharePoint Designer 2007 and new to SharePoint 2010, I strongly recommend you to read through the following article
Discontinued features in SharePoint Designer 2010
Best Practices
1. Do not “Customize” a Page based on a File in the
“14” Hive.
2. Do not Install SPD on SharePoint Server
3. Do not Develop a new Web Part when:
a. It’s already provided Out of The Box
b. The Data View Web Part can be used
4. Do not Customize when
a. SharePoint provides it Out of The Box
b. Don't build a Master Page when a CSS theme will suffice the need.
5. Do not edit the Out of The Box CSS files
6. Do not start customizing from Production directly.
a. We recommend the developer to develop the solution/customize the user interface in their own set up, then port the solution/customization to Kraft development server. After thorough testing, the same should be ported to staging and then Production (Cloud).
7. Don’t delete files which are part of previous solution. In case of any issues, developer should be in a position to roll back to previous solution.
8. Do not modify any system or application pages like (files from 14 hive folder)
9. Do not apply custom master page for system of application pages. While we change the master page, we have two options, site master page and system master page (for example /_layouts/settings.aspx, /_layouts/viewlsts.aspx) . Not to change the system master page.
10. Avoid customizing pages which are frequently accessed and requires less page load time.
11. Make sure you have a way back.
12. If edit Existing Page
a. Create a Copy
b. Make your Amendments to your Copy
c. Make your Copy Active
13. Remember Web Part Properties in Web Part Zones are not versioned.
14. Enable versioning for the artifacts which are getting customized. In case of any issues, this will help rolling back to previous version.
Workflow
Reusable workflows
With SharePoint Designer 2010, you can create workflows that are easily reusable. You can create a reusable workflow in the top-level site in the site collection, and that workflow is globally reusable — meaning that the workflow can be associated to any list or library in the site collection. You can also create a reusable workflow in any sub site in the site collection; this workflow is available for reuse in that particular sub site.
Packaging
A unified packaging system makes it a lot simpler to export an application and import it elsewhere. In SharePoint Designer 2007, there was a packaging schism between .stp site templates and .wsp files. When should one choose one over the other, and why have to choose in the first place? In 2010, this schism was healed .wsp is now the one way to go.
Import and Export artifacts
a) Now you can export a reusable workflow from one site collection and then upload and activate that workflow in a different site collection. SharePoint Designer 2010 supports exporting a workflow as a solution package or .wsp file.
b) Saving a site as a template is a powerful feature because it offers so many different uses of custom sites in SharePoint. Here are the immediate benefits you get from saving a site as a template in SharePoint.
c) Customized SharePoint sites can be deployed as solutions immediately Save and activate the template in the solutions gallery and let other employees create new sites from this template. You don’t need Visual Studio to create your solution, and you have to access the server directly and run server administrator commands. Just save the site as a template, activate it, and off you go.
d) Customized SharePoint sites are portable – In addition to deploying a custom solution in your environment, you can download the .wsp file, take it on the road, and deploy it in another SharePoint environment. All of your site customization is conveniently stored in one file.
e) Customized SharePoint sites are extensible – As a Web Solution Package, you can open your customized site in Visual Studio, perform additional development customization to the template and then deploy it to SharePoint. SharePoint site development, as a result, can go through a site development lifecycle that includes SharePoint Designer 2010, Microsoft Visual Studio, and the browser.
The following table provides a quick summary of what’s in out of a typical site template which you can Export.
Included in user solution WSP |
List |
Libraries |
External Sites |
Data Source Connections |
List Views and Data Views |
Custom Forms |
Workflows |
Content Types |
Custom Actions |
Navigations |
Site Pages |
Master Pages |
Modules |
Web Templates |
Once you’ve saved your site as a template, a solution file (.wsp) is created and stored in the Solution Gallery for the site collection. From here, you can download or activate the solution.
With your solution uploaded and activated in the Solution Gallery, users will see it as an available template on the Create site page in SharePoint. You can select it and create a new site from it, which will inherit the components of the site, its structure, workflows, etc. Also can download your solution from the Solution Gallery and deploy it in another SharePoint environment.
Recommendation
1. Do not allow end users (non-technical) to use SharePoint Designer
2. Reusable workflows should be exported to Visual studio and then do the enhancements
3. Master page customizations done in SharePoint designer should export to Visual studio and a common WSP should be created.
4. Apply required security settings. Below section explains how to control the SharePoint Designer from Server side.
Manage SharePoint Designer 2010
To manage how SharePoint Designer 2010 is used in your organization, you can use one of two SharePoint Designer Settings pages:
· Central Administration > SharePoint Designer Settings
· Site Collection Administration > SharePoint Designer Settings
Both pages can be used to enable or disable SharePoint Designer and its capabilities for detaching pages, editing master pages and page layouts, and editing files in the web site URL structure. The main difference is that in Central Administration, the settings apply to site collection administrators at the web application level – and on the site collection administration page, they apply to designers and owners at the site collection level.
Central Administration
Use the SharePoint Designer Settings page in Central Administration to manage SharePoint Designer at the web application level, which includes all site collections in the web application. These settings apply to site collection administrators and all users of the web application.
Setting |
Definition |
Choose Web Application |
Selects the web application where your SharePoint Designer settings will be applied. |
Enable SharePoint Designer |
Enables or disables SharePoint Designer for the Web Application and all of its site collections.Note If unchecked, users still see SharePoint Designer buttons in the browser, but when they click them, they get a message stating that SharePoint Designer is not allowed on the site. |
Enable Detaching Pages from the Site Definition |
Enables or disables the ability to detach pages from the site definition. If unchecked, SharePoint Designer only allows you to edit pages in normal mode. The Edit File in Advanced Mode is disabled. Note This setting does not apply to pages that have already been detached as well as new blank ASPX or HTML pages created by the user. |
Enable Customizing Master Pages and Layout Pages |
Enables or disables the ability to customize master pages and page layouts. If unchecked, SharePoint Designer does not display Master Pages or Page Layouts in the Navigation pane.Note Page layouts also require publishing enabled on the server, so if you’ve enabled it here but the site isn’t a publishing site, you still won’t see the Page Layouts option in the Navigation pane. |
Enable Managing of the Web Site URL Structure |
Enables or disables the ability to view and edit files in the URL structure of a site. If unchecked, SharePoint Designer does not display the All Files option in the Navigation pane. |
Site Collection Administration
Use the SharePoint Designer settings on the Site Collection Administration page to manage SharePoint Designer at the site collection level, which includes all sites in the collection. The settings apply to all site owners and designers, but not site collection administrators.
Note In SharePoint, only the Designers group and above can open SharePoint sites in SharePoint Designer 2010. As such, all other groups, like Contributors and Readers, aren’t affected by these settings.
Setting |
Definition |
Enable SharePoint Designer |
Enables or disables SharePoint Designer for the site collection and all of its sites. Note If unchecked, users still see SharePoint Designer buttons in the browser, but when they click them, they get a message stating that SharePoint Designer is not allowed on the site. |
Enable Detaching Pages from the Site Definition |
Enables or disables the ability to detach pages from the site definition. If unchecked, SharePoint Designer only allows you to edit pages in normal mode. The Edit File in Advanced Mode is disabled.Note This setting does not apply to pages that have already been detached as well as new blank ASPX or HTML pages created by the user. |
Enable Customizing Master Pages and Layout Pages |
Enables or disables the ability to customize master pages and page layouts. If unchecked, SharePoint Designer does not display Master Pages or Page Layouts in the Navigation pane.Note Page layouts also require publishing enabled on the server, so if you’ve enabled it here but the site isn’t a publishing site, you still won’t see the Page Layouts option in the Navigation pane. |
Enable Managing of the Web Site URL Structure |
Enables or disables the ability to view and edit files in the URL structure of a site. If unchecked, SharePoint Designer does not display the All Files option in the Navigation pane. |
Please Have look https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint-designer-help/ which has detail description on each of the functionality which SharePoint 2010 Designer offers.
Comments
Anonymous
February 09, 2011
It seems like points 6 and 12 contradict each other. As long as you have experienced users working in the product, there's no reason you couldn't have a "development" web part page right in a production site that would allow you to create a custom dataview webpart enabling you to work off real data. That web part can be exported and re-imported right back to any other page within the site. If you had to move that dataview across environments, you'd be continually modifying GUIDs in the dataview. Add to that is the time to replicate some sample data either by backing a production copy of the site or using some sort of mirrored environment. I don't think that's the best approach since SPD is supposed to be the preferred and quickest tool to make these types of changes. Kunal, do you know if there is any real (published) performance comparisons of customized vs uncustomized pages? It's commonly referred to but rarely backed up by any real metrics to support the claim of a performance hit. Thanks for the list of best practices! All the other points were spot on in my opinion. -MarkAnonymous
December 25, 2012
sd