Introducing the ESP Content Editor

!NEW The ESP Content Editor now includes a Variables Editor. Download the new version and try the upgrade. 

Thanks for all the feedback on the Upload Wizard and the Dynamic Quick Launch Master Page. It's great to see folks out there downloading and using those free tools. In the spirit of the holidays, I've put another free tool out in Bamboo Media: The ESP Content Editor is a free Web Part that extends the built-in content editor Web Part to allow on-page editing and a few other nifty features.

Why I built it: I needed a way to quickly prototype CSS changes and see their effects on a live SharePoint page. There are a number of style browsing tools out there, including a few add-ins that let you change the CSS, but none of them included an easy way to save to the page. The ESP Content Editor lets you do that easily:

1. Add the Web Part to a page.
2. Write your custom CSS, JScript, or even plain HTML in the edit box.
3. Click Apply Change to see the effect, edit and correct your code as necessary.
4. Select Hide editor and click Apply Changes to make the edit box invisible. 

Figure 1 shows the Web Part in action.

Figure 1. Using the ESP Content Editor

It's a real Web Part, so once it is installed on your server, you can customize it, export your changes as a .webpart file and reuse on other sites as needed. Just to give you an idea of what you can do, I created a second Web Part based on the ESP Content Editor called the ESP Style Viewer shown in Figure 2. It uses exactly the same server-side code as the ESP Content Editor, only the saved JavaScript and HTML are different.

Figure 2. The ESP Style Editor is based on the ESP Content Editor

There's a lot more to this Web Part which I'll cover in subsequent posts, give it a try and let me know what uses you come up with. I think it's a great building block that gives site owners the ability to create custom Web Parts without writing server-side code (as a site administrator, I like that).

Click Here to Download the ESP Content Editor Now

As always, let me know what you think, and Happy Holidays -- Jeff