I was beginning to feel like I was going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole in my quest to learn how to modify the layout template of an existing Web Part page, so I figured it would be in everyone's best interests for me to raise a hand for help. Five minutes spent with Jeff Kozloff from our Solutions team set me straight on several scores, and put me squarely on the path to enlightenment.
For starters, I learned the reason why I wasn't able to successfully apply a new layout template to the Default.aspx page by overwriting the .aspx file on our team site yesterday. Turns out it doesn't really have anything to do with permissions (or lack thereof) as I had suspected might be the case, but is a result of the fact that the Default page is a special ASP.NET page, as opposed to a standard Web Part page. The good news is that modifying the layout template of the Default page is something that an end user can accomplish, but the bad news is that doing so requires SharePoint Designer. I don't currently have SharePoint Designer myself, but it's certainly worth noting that Microsoft offers free 60-day trials of the product, so this is definitely a topic that I'll be returning to in the future.
Having found out that not all Web Part pages are created equal, and that the Default.aspx page is the exception, however, I revisited the steps I outlined yesterday regarding overwriting an existing Web Part page in order to change its layout template. I played it safe today and hedged my bets by creating an entirely new Web Part page for testing purposes. Once I'd created the new page, I repeated the process I'd attempted yesterday, changing its designated layout template, overwriting the file for the existing Web Part page, and ... hey, look at that! Sure enough, the new layout template was automatically applied to the site when I overwrote the file.
Not that I was surprised, mind you, because I knew that the Web Part page I was trying to overwrite today was a regular ol' Web Part page (unlike the Default.aspx page, which is clearly just too cool for school). So all in all, today was another day of learning a couple of new SharePoint facts ... now if only it wasn't the Default.aspx page that my manager wanted to change the layout template on, everything would be perfect!
Posted
Dec 16 2008, 05:11 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.