Advanced SharePoint design

The Macaw DualLayout adds an extra ‘view’ to your SharePoint publishing pages. It enables advanced web design on SharePoint and easily port existing web designs to SharePoint.

Introduction
Any web developer who has ever built a publishing website on Microsoft SharePoint knows that there are "things you cannot do" in the web design of SharePoint-based web sites. If the web designer knows how to design for SharePoint, this is no big problem, but what if you have an existing website that was not designed for SharePoint and you want to consolidate it on a SharePoint infrastructure? And what if your design agency does not know how to design for SharePoint, or you want to use JavaScript libraries that are incompatible with SharePoint?

Enabling advanced web design on SharePoint
Macaw DualLayout for SharePoint was developed to provide a solution for precisely these situations. It combines the full power of the SharePoint Publishing platform with unrestricted web design. Anything is possible: use jQuery to the fullest or use any other JavaScript library in your website. You can have complete control over styling: use fully customized CSS style sheets without having to combine them with the styling that comes with SharePoint. You can even have multiple <form> elements on a page (i.e. a search box and a contact form) and use clean, accessible, standards compliant HTML to improve page ranking in search engines.

Why do you need this?
When implementing a custom web design on SharePoint Publishing, you have to structure every page with several mandatory placeholders and SharePoint controls. These controls render HTML that depends on SharePoint-provided JavaScript and CSS files. To brand the site, you add your own CSS and JavaScript files. However, modifying the SharePoint provided CSS files is unsupported and it is not easily possible to modify the HTML that SharePoint controls generate. Leaving out a mandatory control or placeholder will break the "edit mode" of the page. Also, the SharePoint-provided CSS and JavaScript are quite large and contain substantial functionality that the web site visitor probably does not need and that also may conflict with your custom branded CSS or JavaScript files. Installing the DualLayout feature will remove these limitations: with it you can create a completely "clean" version of the publishing page without losing the powerful editing capabilities of SharePoint.

How it works
How does this work? Page layouts are the “template pages” of SharePoint Publishing; they contain content fields and web parts. Every page in a SharePoint Publishing web site consists of content that is displayed using a page layout. Macaw DualLayout adds a small but important feature to every page layout. Normally these pages have two modes: “design” and “edit”. DualLayout separates these two modes into separate page layouts, making the two modes independent from each other. The original “WCM mode” page layout uses an original SharePoint web design/theme. The new “view mode” page layout can be designed without the elements that SharePoint normally requires. You can still use publishing fields and web parts, but you can remove placeholders, style and script elements and even the ASP.NET form element.

Easily port your existing web site
Does that sound simple? It is! Don’t underestimate the value DualLayout can bring to your next project. You can now port existing web sites to SharePoint Publishing sites without redesign. Even without changing any HTML markup! You can also use DualLayout to optimize HTML markup of existing SharePoint Publishing sites, to optimize server throughput, reduce network load and reduce page size. For any project, Macaw DualLayout will save a considerable amount of time.

Try it!
Download a trial version of Macaw DualLayout for SharePoint WCM 2010 (upper-right part of this page) to find out if it works for you. You may use this version on development machines. Production web servers require installation of the commercial version.

Commercial version
The commercial version of DualLayout costs EUR 499 per server. The software can be purchased and downloaded here via Avangate.

Would you like to know more about DualLayout, its licensing and pricing, or discuss opportunities for cooperation? Contact us at kd@macaw.nl.