Powershell on When Pigs Fly

Site Design for Easy Site Page Management

Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Does your site pages library look totally unmanageable? Have you had instances where you can see a news post that you created but someone else doesn’t? Is your content not showing up in search or highlighted content web parts? This happens all the time and it is generally an easy fix. I had the good fortune to work with Susan Hanley on a project recently. We were discussing creating a site design to automate some of the pieces of the site architecture she created. She mentioned to me a blog post she created, One simple view to improve SharePoint page and site management. In that post she proposes making minor modifications to the All Pages view to help alleviate some of these common issues and make it easier to manage site pages. She challenged me to create a site script that would replace or update the existing view to include the fields like promoted state to help better manage the contents of the site pages library.

Access Denied Error on Styles Library

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am going to file this one under the “if you need to do something more than twice you should probably write it down”. This gets me frequently enough that I remember I’ve dealt with it before but not frequently enough that I can commit the solution to memory. I find myself using the SPFX React Menu extension quite a bit as a base for creating custom navigation controls. The navigation on that extension is powered by a json file that is uploaded to the Styles Library. In an OOTB site I whenever I try to upload the json file to the Styles Library I get an access denied error. Other traditional files like .txt or .docx work just fine.

Deploying Application Customizers with a Site Design

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes things are harder than they need to be. I have been working on Site Designs recently to automate the creation and deployment of different element in a site. For the most part things were pretty straight forward for what I needed to do, add a theme to a site, add site columns, and add content types. This time around I needed to deploy an SPFx Application Customizer that needed to be installed on individual sites. The official documentation on this is a little lacking. It doesn’t really explain what you need to do in order to make it work. I also looked at the PnP Site Design Samples which got me a little closer. It took me quite a while to figure out the right magic voodoo combination that got it to work.

Using Custom Color for Section Backgrounds and Page Headers

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered where the background colors in SharePoint modern pages comes from? You know, the ones for section background colors and site headers? Have you ever wondered how to change them to your own custom colors?

I had a client that wanted to be able to set the background for the site headers to a specific color. Unfortunately, the color they wanted wasn’t one of the four colors available through the SharePoint UI.

More than I ever wanted to know about the SharePoint Search Topology

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The other night I burned way too many hours trying to fix a broken search service application for what seemed like a ridiculous reason. We have an integration server that we are using for a large project. I was working with it earlier in the day testing some front end code. Later in the evening with no apparent cause it decided to throw the error below on the Search Administration screen. This prevented search from operating and all my client side queries returned a nondescript 500 error telling me to check my search service.

Powershell Commands for Installing Solutions and Features

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

As a SharePoint 2007 developer I have many of the common stsadm commands committed to memory. While stsadm still works in SharePoint 2010 in favor of moving to proficiency in the latest version of the technology here are some of the powershell commands that I use on a daily basis. With that said, I usually create a batch file that runs these commands so that I only need to run one command to get the features updated and features activated.