Using minimal.master in SharePoint breaks AJAX

Funny story, I just spent the better part of a day trying to figure out why our products do not work properly on a customer’s custom master page.

He was using SharePoint 2013, and using the new feature that allows you to upload an HTML file template and have SharePoint convert it to a master page automatically.

Then I tried some of the out of the box sample master pages: Oslo.master, Seattle.master and a minimal.master that I created using the design manager under site look & feel:

Click “Edit master pages” on the left navigation bar:

…and click “Create a minimal master page” above the list.

See, all master pages that I tried worked perfectly, except the minimal.master I created and the master page from my customer.

After a long comparing, trial and error I came up with this simple solution, there are just a few things to change to make AJAX work on these pages:

1. You need to remove the SPWebPartManager from the head. This control must be inside the ASP.Net form tag in order to work properly:

<!--SPM:<SharePoint:AjaxDelta id="DeltaSPWebPartManager" runat="server">-->

<!--SPM:<WebPartPages:SPWebPartManager runat="server"/>-->

<!--SPM:</SharePoint:AjaxDelta>-->

2. Next, you must add the SPWebPart manager along the the missing script manager control as first children of the body:

<!--SPM:<WebPartPages:SPWebPartManager runat="Server"/>-->

<!--SPM:<asp:ScriptManager id="ScriptManager" runat="server" EnablePageMethods="false" EnablePartialRendering="true" EnableScriptGlobalization="false" EnableScriptLocalization="true"/>-->

And that’s it, now my ajax updates were working correctly and there was much rejoicing.

I can’t say there won’t be any other issues with these master pages in the future, that’s why I recommend you don’t start with minimal.master, but instead, use the default, Oslo or Seattle – these look much more stable and work right out of the box without the need to tweak them first.

Good luck!

Catalog: AnchorProject. A master merge was started due to an external request.

Today I was getting this warning in my server event log:
event id 4164 and 4103
Catalog: AnchorProject. A master merge was started due to an external request.

Since it was flodding my event viewer I didnt even see the other issues there... but one of the servers CPU was in max usage all the time (100%, but since we had 2 CPU task manager shows 50% total usage)...

Well, as I was digging up more info here is what I came up with and how I solved this issue:

1: I was getting an error on a certain page from within a site ( a custom list view ) that referenced the wrong master page - /_layouts/application.master. Since the celler page was in the list and not in the /_layouts/ folder this was blocked by ASP.NET
2: The caller user was my search user, lucky it is a unique user so I could be sure it was invoked by the indexer

So, after I fixed / deleted these 2 pages - the indexer stopped trying to index them, and 30 seconds after that the errors were gone and CPU back to normal...

Hope this helps you guys too, I will update if I get more info on this.

How to improve SEO of you WCM sites

Well, as many of you might know - the most important thing for an internet facing web site is to be found easily in the leading search engines.

Because it does not matter how nice and sexy you "pimped" your web site, nor how relevant and profound is the content - if no one can find it your web site is as good as dead.


Ok, so you will be happy to learn that WCM (Web content management) sites that are created in SharePoint 2007 are pretty SEO-aware (Search Engine Optimization), and this comes a long way for you.


Some key features you enjoy with no hard work:


* Navigation, is configured OOTB (Out Of The Box) to reach all pages, expose them to the search bot / spider / what-you-might-call-it. All links are true a href links, no scripts.
* Zero to none use of hidden frames (only place you'll find them is in authoring mode
* Caching support and special attention for anonymous users (used by the search engines)


And much much more...



But - we are here to see what can we do to make it even better? How can I improve my site SEO?



Well, from a little research I did for a customer of mine while back we found 3 things that are actually can improve our SEO greatly.
(Important: I and not teaching how to cheat search engines! This is very dangerouse to play with. Simply how to make your site friendlier to search engines. You still have to have good content, incoming links and such to get good ratings on your site)



1: Turning off the view state.
2: Adding a site map for google.
3: Adding meta-tags for keywords and description for relevant content pages (advanced)

Ok, so let's go over these options and see what is the benefit and how it can be achieved:

Turning off the view state

What is gained?

If you right click->view source on any content page in MOSS you will see right at the beginning of the body tag you will see a input type hidden tag with id=__VIEWSTATE... then, its value will pretty much take your entire page so you'll have to scroll down several times...

So, apparently this gigantic piece of information is something that most search engines do not like to say the least. Especially when it comes before you true content of the page - it ruins your content rating in the search results!

Another obvious reason is, your page is larger... and larger pages are slower to load, and search engines will mark your page as a slower page... we don't want that.

How is it done?

Removing the view state from your WCM web application is rather easy. Simply go to your web application root directory (usually smth like: c:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\xxxx),backup web.config file, and open it for edit in notepad. Look for enableViewState="true" and change it to false.

No need for IISRESET, but you site will experience a very small delay on the next request.

Adding a site map for google.

What is gained?

When a search engine (google in my example) starts indexing a web site it first of all checks to see if someone had prepared a "work order" for him. This "work-order" is what we call a sitemap / site map XML file that will allow us to make special requests for the crawler when it is working on our site.

If we do not have such a sitemap file, the engine will just open the home page of our web site and start crawling all links it can find on it for sub pages and so on and so forth...

This is usually good enough, except for cases where:

We want to have a section in our site that is not exposed by a link at the top site. Like http://www.kwizcom.com/ will not show a link to www.kwizcom.com/support (only example) which will hold our products support forum.

In this case - with no site map, our /support site will not be available at google at all.

Another problem we can prevent using a site map file is, when you have the same content in 3 different pages on your web site. 1 at the home page, and twice at the specific product information pages... Google will think you keep duplicate content and will lower your web site rank!

Using a sitemap, you can choose specifically what pages you want google to crawl, what pages are more important than others and what pages you don't want him to load.

One last benefit you gain by using a site map is that you can tell the engine what is the lifespan of each of your pages. Meaning: how often does its content change - monthly? weekly? so google will be sure to check it up every once in a while and update its content. Cool, eh?

How is it done?

Well, building a site map for MOSS (or any site for that matter) can of course be done manually, but you have to keep in mind that we are talking about a lot of pages to add to the XML files and this can be very time consuming!

Furthermore, you have to rebuild your site map every once in a while to reflect changes, additions and deletions...

You can develop a utility that does that for you, or use our site map builder here:

http://www.kwizcom.com/ProductPage.asp?ProductID=737&ProductSubNodeID=738

Once you got your hands on a site map generator, your work is just starting:

You will need to make changes in the XML to hide pages you don't want to show, change rating for more important pages and customize other information on it to match your requirements.

Adding meta-tags for keywords and description for relevant content pages (advanced)

What is gained?

By adding a meta tags of keywords and description to your pages you will let the search engine what content is your web site or web page targets.

This helps to raise the quality of the content in your web site. You may want to add specific keywords /description to all pages, and allow some pages to have additional information added to them.

How is it done?

Doing this can be very simple or very complex depends on your needs...

In the most simple straigh forward way - just edit your web site's master page and add the meta tags for keywords + description to the HTML head node like so:

<meta name="Description" content="KWizCom, knowledge worker components">

<meta name="Keywords" content="buy web parts, products, sharepoint, wss, moss">

But, if you requier your content to be changed according to the information of the current page (let's say you wish the page's title to go in to the description along with the site's name, and you have a metadata field named: keywords you wish to be loaded into the keywords tag), things get a little tricky.

But not to fear! I have created a control that will allow you to plant it in the master page and define what exactly you wish to see in these meta tags... it's just that using it is a bit tricky, so for now I don't have time to elaborate. But if you want it anyway before I manage to write a post about it - write me to shai at kwizcom.com and I will send it to you and try to help you configure it.

---

Ok, that concludes my post so far... it's been a very long while since I posted here, just in case you wondered - I relocated myself to Thornhill ON and didn't have enough time for nothing...

Hope this helps some of you,

Thanks,

Shai Petel

Nested Master Pages in SharePoint - Troubleshoot

Recently one of my customers needed to maintain basic layouts rules while allowing different solution creators in his company to generate new master pages for their applications.

Naturally - we looked for nested master pages.

This solution would allow us to create a parent master page that all other master pages will inherit and apply our branding and design rules with very little effort.

Problem was that when I tried to inherit blueband.master into child.master things did not work.
The ASPX page that was using child.master could not enter edit mode, and I could not add / remove nor edit web parts in it.

After reading another post on the internet - I accidently found the solution – unghosting the master pages will solve this issue and nested master pages will start working!

All I had to do to make this work is to unghost blueband.master by opening it in SharePoint Designer and saving it – so it was customized.

Done!

So to create a sub master page to blueband.master that only supports editing the PlaceHolderMain area add this code to child.master:


<?xml:namespace prefix = asp /><asp:content id="Content1" runat="server" contentplaceholderid="PlaceHolderMain">
<asp:contentplaceholder id="PlaceHolderMain" runat="server"></asp:contentplaceholder>
</asp:content>

Hope this helps you guys… Good luck.

Adding the quick launch to team site pages

Hi All

Ever tried to add a new page in a WSS Team Site?

Well, after you create a new page, using the "Create web part page" wizard:

you probably noticed the following issues:

1. You have to create a document library to store them (unless you save them in "Shared Documents" library, but we wouldn't want to mix documents and site pages, would we?)

2. They look different from the team site's home page - where did the quick launch go??

OK, so the solution is quite simple, and there are 2 cases here:

1. If you have MOSS 2007 - All you have to do is to activate the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing" feature for your team site. Once you activate this feature, the team site will have some publising site features: a new "pages" library will be created, and all new created pages will be automatically stored in this library. In addition all pages will display the same "envelope" - including the missing quick launch on the left side of each page.

The only problem with this solution is that now every change you make requires publishing, and this is certainly NOT a natural part of team-site working flow.

2. If you only have WSS installed - in this case you don't have the "Office SharePoint Server Publishing" feature installed. however, you can change the team site page templates, and have them display the quick launch. This is quite easy to implement, so here it goes:

• Browse the "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\STS\DOCTEMP\SMARTPGS" folder on the SharePoint server.
  This folder contains all templates that you see in the "New Web Part Page" wizard:
  
  
  


• Every page inherits the same team site's master page, and all of them override this master page's placeholder tags. This is why the quick launch is not displayed in new pages created in a team site (don't ask me why it was done like this, I don't have a clue..).
  
  


• Simply delete the "PlaceHolderLeftNavBar" content tag in the required templates and save the file/s:
  
  

That's it!

Now, create a new web part page, based on the template you have just changed, and notice that the quick launch appears exactly as it is in the home page.

One last thing to remember:

Since the changes are done in the file system, these changes apply to all team sites on your SharePoint server.

Nimrod Geva
KWizCom - Knowledge Worker Components