What Can You Do with SharePoint Designer 2010? 677 26. To try the site workflow, go back to your site and click Site ActionsView All Site Content. At the top of the page, click the Site Workflows link. 27. Click the Employee Reviews link (see Figure 22-53), which will open the page where you can fill out the form to start the workflow. Fill out the form and press Start. To make this form easier to access, you can copy the form’s URL and create a link directly to the form. FIGURE 2253 28. If you go back to the Employee Review list, you’ll see that a new item has been created, the manager has been successfully looked up, and the information entered into the form has been added (see Figure 22-54). A task should have also been created for the manager, which you can see by clicking Site Actions View All Site Content then clicking on the Site Workflows link. FIGURE 2254 This example showed how you can create a workflow that captures information into a form, looks up the manager of the person who started the workflow, writes the information to a list, and then assigns a task to the manager. Although this was a very basic workflow example, these concepts can be expanded and repeated to create much more robust and complex workflows that don’t require any custom code. Branding As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, most people associate SharePoint Designer with designing websites. When the product was introduced with SPD 2007, it was obvious by looking 678 CHAPTER 22 WorkiNg With sharePoiNt desigNer 2010 at the interface that the tool was intended for editing HTML pages. Although the focus on SPD 2010 seems to be more on managing SharePoint sites, SPD 2010 is still the primary tool for cus- tomizing the look and feel of your SharePoint site to reflect your corporate brand. The common term used for this task is branding. Branding is covered in more detail in Chapter 23, but in terms of SharePoint, it refers to the objects that work together to create the look and feel for the site. This includes the master pages, page layouts, CSS, HTML, fonts, and so on. The following three elements are particularly relevant to SharePoint: Master page — Registers all of the SharePoint controls on the page and then arranges them via HTML, CSS, and content placeholders. It is a primary factor in influencing the look and feel of a site or page. Every page that is rendered in SharePoint requires a master page. Page layout — Basically a template for content. Using field controls, users enter content that is then rendered as a web page based on the design of the page layout itself. It can be thought of as a more heavily styled version of entering content into a list. Page layouts are available only with sites where Publishing has been enabled. Cascading style sheets (CSS) — Used heavily throughout SharePoint to determine the overall look and feel. Branding a SharePoint site usually requires creating custom CSS. Regardless of your skill level with branding, SPD is often the first place to begin when trying to change the look and feel of your SharePoint site. Hiding the All Site Content and the Recycle Bin in Your Master Page Editing master pages is covered in more detail in Chapter 23, but SharePoint Designer offers some new functionality that makes the branding process even easier. The following example walks through the process of performing one of the more common branding requests: hiding the All Site Content and Recycle Bin links from the left navigation. This example makes changes to a Team Site, so if your site uses a different template the steps may vary slightly. 1. Open your site in SPD and click the Master Pages link in the navigation pane. 2. Click v4.master to bring up the settings page for the file. For this example, you’ll be making changes directly to this master page, but in a production environment it is recommended that you first copy any system files before making any changes. 3. Click the link to Edit file from from under the Customization section of the summary page. If you are using a publishing site you might be prompted to check out the file before proceeding. 4. Click the Skewer Click link in the Ribbon (see Figure 22-55). Skewer Click is a new functionality in SPD 2010 that enables you to see the various CSS that is responsible for rendering an element. 5. With Skewer Click selected, hover over the area near where the Recycle Bin and All Site Content links are located. Move your mouse around the area and you should see the name PlaceHolderQuickLaunchBottom faintly appear above the link for the Recycle bin. Click on it to select it, which will open another window displaying a list of styles and then select the style called ul.s4-specialNav (see Figure 22-56). What Can You Do with SharePoint Designer 2010? 679 FIGURE 2255 FIGURE 2256 6. To edit the style you first need to add a new panel. From the Ribbon, click the Style tab and select the CSS Properties button (see Figure 22-57). 7. When the new panel opens, you’ll see the top section is called Applied Rules. The style you need (.s4-specialNavLinkList) should be already selected. It may be tough to read the entire name of the style so it might be easier to make the right panel a little wider. Right-click on the style and select New Style Copy (see Figure 22-58). FIGURE 2257 FIGURE 2258 8. At the top of the New Style dialog, shown in Figure 22-59, set the new style to be defined in the Current page. Be sure to check the box Apply new style to document selection, and then select Layout category and set the visibility to hidden. Click OK. 9. Save the changes made to the master page. When you view the site now, the links for All Site Content and the Recycle Bin will be hidden. You might get a warning after you save the file that says “Saving your changes will customize this page so that it is no longer based on the site definition.” Click Yes to continue. When you browse back to your site, the All Site Content and Recycle bin links are now hidden (see Figure 22-60). 680 CHAPTER 22 WorkiNg With sharePoiNt desigNer 2010 FIGURE 2259 FIGURE 2260 In this example you used the New Style Copy feature, which is new to SharePoint Designer 2010. This feature makes it quick and easy to safely update CSS for your site. Selecting New Style Copy makes a copy of the style you want to edit and then defines it where you specify — in this case, it made the changes inline at the top of the master page. If you look at the Design view of the master page, you’ll see the following code has been added: <style type=”text/css”> .s4-specialNavLinkListCopy Summary 681 { margin: 0px; /* [ReplaceColor(themeColor:”Light2-Lightest”)] */ border-top: 1px solid #dbddde; padding-top: 5px; visibility: hidden; } </style> Notice that the style was copied and appended with “Copy.” Simply selecting New Style Copy creates this reference, but it is necessary to check the Apply new style to document selection option, which changes the reference of the style you want to change to the copied style. Without checking the box, you’d need to make manual changes in order to get the style to apply your changes properly. Instead of applying the styles inline, you can also choose to apply the changes to a separate CSS file. The result is the same, but instead of the code being inline, the custom CSS file would be auto- matically referenced. If you are making several changes to CSS, it is recommended that you use the option to reference a separate CSS file in order to keep the master page code cleaner. SUMMARY This chapter discussed the many capabilities of SharePoint Designer 2010. Users who are familiar with the previous version should appreciate the improvements made to this latest version, which include the following highlights: The user interface for SharePoint Designer 2010 has been redesigned to put more focus on the various SharePoint objects and less focus on being a page editor. SPD 2010 has been divided into three areas: Navigation, Ribbon, and Gallery and Summary. Access to SPD can be controlled by farm administrators from Central Administration or by site collection administrators from the site settings page. To prevent users from getting into trouble, you can restrict SPD by customizing specific pages or more broadly by removing the permission to use SPD altogether. Connections to LOB systems such as external databases can now be made directly from SPD using the BCS. Information from these external systems can be surfaced in SharePoint as an external list, where users can interact with it just as if it were a regular SharePoint list. Changes made to the external list are reflected in the LOB system. SPD 2010 enables users to quickly customize views using the XSLT List View Web Part. List forms can be customized in InfoPath directly from SPD. Declarative workflows can be created with SPD, which enables users to create no-code solu- tions to streamline business processes. There are three types of SPD workflows: List, Reusable, and Site. SPD is the primary tool for customizing the look and feel of your SharePoint site. Branding SharePoint 2010 WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER? Understanding branding in SharePoint Themes Master pages Page layouts Cascading style sheets Controlling access to branding in SharePoint When you think of administering SharePoint, branding and user interface design is usually not the fi rst thing that comes to mind. While most farm administrators are not very interested in tweaking colors and fonts, you need to understand how the process works behind the scenes. This is especially important with SharePoint because unlike many traditional web develop- ment projects, SharePoint projects require a high level of interaction between IT professionals, administrators, designers, and developers. As designers and developers create user interfaces, administrators need to ensure that those design assets live and play well with everything else that is part of a SharePoint farm. WHAT IS BRANDING? Branding is the act of creating a specifi c image or identity that people will recognize in rela- tion to a company. When you think of Coca-Cola, you probably fi rst think of their distinctive red and white logo; and when you think of United Parcel Service (UPS), the fi rst image that comes to mind is either their brown trucks or uniforms. When you see these colors, you are immediately reminded of the products or services for which each of these companies is known. One reason is probably because of all the advertising that bombards you on a daily basis; but it’s also because both of these companies have a strong branding strategy, one that permeates all of their products and advertising, including their websites. 23 . pages. Although the focus on SPD 2010 seems to be more on managing SharePoint sites, SPD 2010 is still the primary tool for cus- tomizing the look and feel of your SharePoint site to reflect your. CHAPTER 22 WorkiNg With sharePoiNt desigNer 2010 FIGURE 2259 FIGURE 2260 In this example you used the New Style Copy feature, which is new to SharePoint Designer 2010. This feature makes. highlights: The user interface for SharePoint Designer 2010 has been redesigned to put more focus on the various SharePoint objects and less focus on being a page editor. SPD 2010 has been divided into