yakimadev

It seems like there is very little documentation online from Microsoft on customizing layouts for things like Blog Sites and Blog posts in Sharepoint 2010.  I did find some posts about it online, but they were very terse and general.

This is going to be a very simple and to the point post about how to customize a Sharepoint 2010 blog post, specifically how to remove the table column with the Post date in it ( the td with ms-leftblogdate for css).  This requires you to create a new XSL template file and then connect that file to the post.

• Step 1, locate the blog.xsl file on your Sharepoint server, mine was located in the following folder:
  • C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\XSL
• In Sharepoint Designer create a new folder and a new file for the customized XSL file you will be creating
  • I created a folder called “xsl” in the root of my Blog site and then created a file called blogPost.xsl.
• Copy the contents of the blog.xsl file into the file you just created, in my case I called it blogPost.xsl
• In Sharepoint  Designer open up the Post.aspx file
  • It’s in the Lists/Posts directory of your Blog Site
• Click the Advanced Mode button in the Ribbon
• Switch the Sharepoint Designer to Design Mode (the button is circled in red in the image below)
• Click on the empty cell where the Post will appear.  If you can’t tell where this is, look at the image below to help you locate it.  It will be a WebPartPages:XsltListVewWebpart object
• In the “Tag Properties” window of Sharepoint Designer on the right side of the screen, locate the property “XslLink” and type in the location of the new XSL file you created above
  • This will be something like /blog/xsl/blogPost.xsl if you followed along above
    

    Customize Blog Posts to use New Customized XSL File

• Return to the file you just created, blogPosts.xsl, and make your edits.  I searched for the code <td class = “ms-leftblogdate”> and removed this entire TD because it was making my design look bad.
• Save both the blogPosts.xsl and the Posts.aspx files and then reload your page.  You should see your changes reflected.

I wanted the breadcrumbs to look similar to the way they did in Sharepoint 2003.  I found some good posts online showing how to do this, but then I found out pretty quick that the breadcrumbs weren’t working on my Site Actions-Site Settings pages.  The way I customized these breadcrumbs below is bad practice and in fact if you make changes like I do below your changes will probably get overwritten when you upgrade Sharepoint. That being said, I couldn’t find anyone else online that offered a solution that worked.  So this is how it’s going to be for now.

Here’s what I did.  I found out that all the Site Settings pages are aspx files in the _layouts directory, so I located the directory on my server at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\template\layouts

Then I used a text editor to do a find and replace in all the files in this folder (over 100 files in total).  I found the following code:

<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent UIVersion="3" runat="server"><ContentTemplate>
<asp:SiteMapPath SiteMapProvider="SPXmlContentMapProvider" id="ContentMap" SkipLinkText="" NodeStyle-CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" RootNodeStyle-CssClass="s4-die" PathSeparator="&#160;&gt; " PathSeparatorStyle-CssClass = "s4-bcsep" runat="server" />
</ContentTemplate></SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>
<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent UIVersion="4" runat="server"><ContentTemplate>
<SharePoint:ListSiteMapPath runat="server" SiteMapProviders="SPSiteMapProvider,SPXmlContentMapProvider" RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="false" PathSeparator="" CssClass="s4-breadcrumb" NodeStyle-CssClass="s4-breadcrumbNode" CurrentNodeStyle-CssClass="s4-breadcrumbCurrentNode" RootNodeStyle-CssClass="s4-breadcrumbRootNode" HideInteriorRootNodes="true" SkipLinkText="" />
</ContentTemplate>
</SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>
<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent UIVersion="3" runat="server">
<ContentTemplate>
<asp:SiteMapPath SiteMapProvider="SPXmlContentMapProvider" id="ContentMap" SkipLinkText="" NodeStyle-CssClass="ms-sitemapdirectional" RootNodeStyle-CssClass="s4-die" PathSeparator="&#160;&gt; " PathSeparatorStyle-CssClass = "s4-bcsep" runat="server" />
</ContentTemplate>
</SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>
<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent UIVersion="4" runat="server">
<ContentTemplate>
<SharePoint:ListSiteMapPath runat="server" SiteMapProviders="SPSiteMapProvider,SPXmlContentMapProvider" RenderCurrentNodeAsLink="false" PathSeparator="" CssClass="s4-breadcrumb" NodeStyle-CssClass="s4-breadcrumbNode" CurrentNodeStyle-CssClass="s4-breadcrumbCurrentNode" RootNodeStyle-CssClass="s4-breadcrumbRootNode" HideInteriorRootNodes="true" SkipLinkText="" />
</ContentTemplate>
</SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>

And also I had to replace this code as well:

<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent UIVersion=”3″ runat=”server”><ContentTemplate>

<asp:SiteMapPath

SiteMapProvider=”SPXmlContentMapProvider”

id=”ContentMap”

SkipLinkText=”"

NodeStyle-CssClass=”ms-sitemapdirectional”

RootNodeStyle-CssClass=”s4-die”

PathSeparator=”&#160;&gt; ”

PathSeparatorStyle-CssClass = “s4-bcsep”

runat=”server” />

</ContentTemplate></SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>

<SharePoint:UIVersionedContent UIVersion=”4″ runat=”server”><ContentTemplate>

<SharePoint:ListSiteMapPath

runat=”server”

SiteMapProviders=”SPSiteMapProvider,SPXmlContentMapProvider”

RenderCurrentNodeAsLink=”false”

PathSeparator=”"

CssClass=”s4-breadcrumb”

NodeStyle-CssClass=”s4-breadcrumbNode”

CurrentNodeStyle-CssClass=”s4-breadcrumbCurrentNode”

RootNodeStyle-CssClass=”s4-breadcrumbRootNode”

HideInteriorRootNodes=”true”

SkipLinkText=”" />

</ContentTemplate></SharePoint:UIVersionedContent>

And I replaced the above 2 code blocks with the following code:

<asp:SiteMapPath SiteMapProvider=”SPXmlContentMapProvider” id=”ContentMap” runat=”server”/>

After I did this, it looks like the breadcrumbs are now fixed on all my Site Settings pages.  I have a bad feeling that I will regret doing it this way, but like I said I couldn’t figure out a better way.  And if it comes down to it and I run into a problem I can always reverse the steps above and put the old code back in.

NOTE: You might have to rearrange your design if you do exactly what I did above.  My design works well with the above changes because I’ve hidden the page title.   If I unhide the page title, then my breadcrumbs run right over top of my page title and I would need to move the page title.

Sharepoint 2010 searches would return no entries for my site.  I looked in the Crawl Log in Central Administration and was repeatedly getting 6 errors.

Sharepoint 2010 Crawl Logs (note that the first line has no errors because this was taken after I fixed the problem)

The errors mentioned that there was problems with indexing the site because of problems with the HTTPS (SSL) certificate for the site.  Well, since we have a very small sharepoint install (one server), and I know the SSL cert is good I don’t care if sharepoint thinks the certificate is bad.  I just want SP to index the sites.

Solution
So I finally figured out how to fix this.

1. In Sharepoint Central Admin click on “General Application Settings” on the left menu on the Central Admin homepage
2. Then click on “Farm Search Administration” under the Search icon
3. It will take you to a page with “Farm-Level Search Settings.”  One of these is Ignore SSL Warnings.  It should say No next to it by default.  Click No.
4. A window will pop up that will allow you check a box the Ignore SSL certificate name warnings.  Check this box and click OK.
   
5. After you do this you will need to re-index your site.
   • To do so go back to the Central Admin homepage and click “Manage Service Applications” under the Application Management heading.
   • On the list of services click “Search Service Appilcation.”
   • Click “Content Sources” in the left menu and then click the name of your Content Source, mine is “Local Sharepoint sites.”
   • Next scroll down to the bottom of the screen and check the box that says “Start full crawl of this content source.”  Then click ok and it should start indexing your site.

Now your search should work!

I had a disk that was 2.2 TB but when I opened disk management in the Server Manager, it showed that the disk was split into 2 unallocated partitions, one that was 2 TB and one that was 168 GB.  By default Windows 2008 R2 automatically sets new disks as MBR, which has a limit of 2TB, and therefore it splits it into two partitions.

If you want only one partition, right click on the disk in Disk Management (in the Server Manager), and select “Convert to GPT.” This will convert the disk to use GUID Partition Table (GPT), and you should then see the disk with one complete unallocated partition with OVER 2TB.  Here’s a document at Microsoft that discusses GPT.  Keep in mind that you can only do this before you put data on the drive, and also using GPT has it’s considerations as well, so you will want to read documentation about GPT to make sure it’s what you want.

The credentials you provided for the SQL Server Agent (or Database Engine or etc) Service are invalid. To Continue, provide a valid…

I run into this error almost everytime I install SQL Server 2008, because I’m not thinking and I try to install SQL Server while logged onto windows with a local user account.

If you want to install SQL Server 2008 and have it use Domain credentials to start the service accounts as I was trying in the picture above, you need to be logged onto the box as a Domain user NOT a local user.  You will also want to be sure that this Domain user has administrator privileges to your server or else you might run into some other problems in the install.