Oscar Medina

Responsive Web Design and Development with HTML5

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.

Integrating Location-Based Features

We have been looking at many new features and capabilities in SharePoint 2013 related to building responsive web sites. With the rapid adoption of smart phones and tablets, we have the opportunity to use GPS capabilities in mobile devices to support location-based features in our web sites. Knowing the users location helps to boost the quality of the site. In this chapter, we demonstrate how to use the new geolocation metadata field in SharePoint 2013 and the HTML5 Geolocation API to integrate maps and location-based features into a site. First, we look at the basics of the HTML5 Geolocation API. Then we demonstrate the new geolocation features in SharePoint 2013. Finally, we explore how we can extend the new geolocation features in SharePoint 2013 and walk through an example by building our own SharePoint-hosted app to integrate SharePoint geolocation, HTML5 geolocation, and Bing Maps features into the Specter Group community site.

Supporting Multilingual Web Sites

To compete in todays globalized marketplace for products and services, businesses need to ensure their web sites support multiple languages. The majority of the Internets content is in English and as a result, it is also one of the most competitive languages to market in. There are other huge markets to be targeted that are much less saturated and provide more cost-effective marketing opportunities. Potential customers in different markets appreciate businesses that make the effort to provide them information about products and services in their native language. Many users become disengaged with sites that do not facilitate access through their local languages. A companys web site can demonstrate the companys maturity and show customers the company is capable of conducting business in multiple languages. The need for multilingual web sites is growing. More companies are making the investment to make their web sites multilingual, which has produced measurable improvements in company sales and customer satisfaction. In this chapter, we build our own multilingual sites using the Variations and Translation Services features in SharePoint 2013.

Configuring a Development Environment

Throughout this book you have been exposed to many aspects of working with SharePoint 2013, including how to brand SharePoint and how to build simple SharePoint Apps. Most SharePoint projects are developed not in a production environment, but rather in some type of development environment. If you do not have access to an existing development environment in your organization, this appendix is for you. If your organization already has a SharePoint 2013 development environment, or you are looking for additional options, you might find some useful alternatives in this appendix.

Making Your Master Page Responsive

The previous chapter walked us through importing an HTML prototype and its related branding assets into SharePoint 2013 using Design Manager. Now, what would you end up with? A newly branded site on one of the most powerful WCM platforms available on the market. It is a fairly impressive feat for a process that used to take expert SharePoint designers weeks or more to complete with previous versions of SharePoint.

Publish Cross-Site Content with Catalogs

The core of any Web Content Management (WCM) solution ultimately is content. We find that having the ability to effectively manage and reuse your web sites content is paramount. We can expect to have a large amount of content over time and this will eventually (and inevitably) affect the web site back end in terms of capacity and performance if not planned accordingly. Therefore, planning for reusable content can pay off in the long term. SharePoint 2010 had a built-in feature that allowed content owners to reuse content; one could save snippets of text such as copyright and footer content. When creating or editing pages, the Ribbon provided access to this reusable content, which could then be inserted into the publishing page. This capability still exists in SharePoint 2013; however, this is quite limited and not enough, as it does not cover other content type such as media and images that are prime candidates for reusability.

Uploading and Working with Files

The ability to allow users to upload files is a very important feature in modern web design. SharePoint provides out-of-the-box file upload capability, but the out-of-the-box file upload control is embedded in a SharePoint page without providing any extensibility to this feature. There are times when business logic requires us to provide users with file upload capability without ever leaving the page (e.g., when filling out a form) or to provide a different user interface or file preview capability. In such advanced scenarios for working with files, we need to allow users to upload files to SharePoint from the client side.

What’s New in SharePoint 2013 Web Content Management

SharePoint 2013 introduces new and improved features for web content management that simplify how we design Internet sites and enhance the authoring and publishing processes for our organization. This chapter provides an overview of the new features for web content management in SharePoint 2013. We also look at how we will be using these new features in later chapters to build our example web site.

Building Site Structure and Navigation

In this chapter we review common types of navigation a site might incorporate, including horizontal navigation, vertical navigation, footer-based navigation, and social media icon bars. We investigate different options available to us in SharePoint 2013 that can assist us with integrating and managing these different navigation components. With the addition of managed metadata-driven navigation in SharePoint 2013, we can build even more custom, complete navigation structures, still managed by SharePoint, than we could with SharePoint 2010. By the end of the chapter we will have learned how to configure a SharePoint 2013 web site to allow for managed metadata-driven navigation as well as how to modify an HTML master page and other branding elements to include responsive-friendly navigation elements.

Building Page Layouts and Publishing Pages

In this chapter we investigate how to add content pages to our site and how content pages link to page layouts whether they be out-of-the-box (OOTB) or custom page layouts. We begin with a look at content types, both OOTB and custom, that we will leverage when creating custom page layouts. We review the value and properties of content types and why we create our own custom content types, as well as where they are stored in SharePoint 2013. We review OOTB page layouts as well as create custom HTML page layouts using Design Manager. We also learn how to link page layouts to both OOTB and custom content types. We continue with a look at the properties of a page layout that allow it to be responsive, and conclude by learning how to utilize a page layout in a new content page.