Wednesday, July 18, 2012

SharePoint 2013 Design Manager

The design manager allows site master page created from existing design. It does not mean the master page will be generated and ready. It saving the developer effort to manually merge the html design into a minimal master page. Also SharePoint 2013 provides Snippets function, which generate the html snippet of sharepoint components.

SharePoint 2013 add a new feature called design channel. By adding rules to match substring from the user-agent, it can return diffeent site design.


To be able to use "Open with Explorer" function to manage the design files, need to make sure on the server, IIS should have the Webdav publishing role installed.



The webclient service also needs to be installed in client pc. The service can be installed by add the "Desktop experience" featue.


In Edit MasterPage, select Convert an HTML file to a SharePoint master page, then select jus uploaded html design file, a same name master page will be converted. This master page is auto matically generated from the original html template file, so it can not be edited, renamed or deleted.

The html file has its own content type. By edit the html file properties, there is a check box to decide wheter the master page is associated to it.


Make sure the html design file needs to be published first, only after that, the master page of the site can be changed to this style.


Even the html is converted into a master page, there still a lot components to be added.
Such as replace the current dummy navigation to SharePoint global navigation.
SharePoint 13 provides this code snippet pages to generate the needed control source for you to update them to the right place in html design. This can be accessed from the top panel of the site preview.




The screen shot shows all the SharePoint controls you can add, also you can customize their styles easily to match the new site design. Then a html snippet will be created.

How to use Snippet gallery and add custom control to Snippet gallery on Ribbon should be another topic to discuss later. 







1 comment:

Jessie Wang said...

Is this a new feature or replacing some of the functionality in Designer?