How to disable web part chrome

In the context of a highly-branded WCM site, the default "chrome" (border and title) SharePoint wraps around your custom web parts can be ugly and inconvenient. At worst, it will make your site look SharePoint-y and require every web part added to a page to have its Chrome settings manually adjusted.

That's no way for a web part to behave in content management system but what to do?

In the past I've set the chrome type explicitly for each custom web part, either in the .webpart/.dwp file itself or programmatically:

<property name="ChromeType" type="chrometype">None</property>

this.ChromeType = PartChromeType.None;

To avoid doing this per web part (or cluttering up your nice little base web part class), you can set the PartChromeType property on the WebPartZone declared in your page layout:

<WebPartPages:WebPartZone id="wpzLeftColumn" runat="server" title="Left Column" PartChromeType="None">

Any web parts added to that zone with a default Chrome Type (aptly named "Default") will inherit this setting from the web part zone. Of course individual web parts can override this as required.

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westernaustralia.com site re-launch on MOSS 2007

westernaustralia.com today gets a facelift on the coattails of the corporate site relaunch a few weeks back. The westernaustralia.com site is Tourism Western Australia’s premier consumer-facing web site and targets visitors seeking quality, unbiased information about Western Australia.

This is the first major visual change to the site since TWA launched WA.COM on the MOSS 2007 platform in May 2007. The site is regularly cited as an early, shining example of how far you can take custom branding and SharePoint. Under the covers, the site employs all the SharePoint tricks you’re used to: master pages, page layouts, web parts, content types, lists—you name it. The only thing we don’t make use of that might otherwise factor into a WCM site is SharePoint search and the BDC (we’ve built a custom solution for that).

The English-language sites alone delivered more than eight million page views in the last twelve months to an international audience. We currently run the site on the back of a single Windows 2003 x86 web front end (which also hosts the tourism.wa.gov.au site as a separate web app) and SQL Server 2005 database server shared by all of our MOSS-based web sites. Site traffic is additionally accelerated by Akamai and cached by regional Akamai nodes to ensure visitors can access the site quickly and reliably from all over the world.

The new changes are part of an interim visual shift as Marketing prepare for a new brand launch later this year. Apart from the look and feel, which was aimed at reducing clutter and softening existing brand elements, the site is moving towards dynamic (i.e. social) content (see the twitter feed!) and the home page in particular has been positioned to display fresh content like events and deals.

Want more? For some more examples of the heavily branded sites we’ve rolled out on the MOSS platform over the last year, check out the side bar on this page (“Some of the MOSS sites I’ve worked on”) and watch the videos (1, 2).

Disclaimer: I’m a contractor working at TWA. Mediawhole is not directly affiliated in any way with the agency or the web sites; when I say “we”, I mean the royal We.

Tourism WA Corporate Site Relaunched on MOSS 2007

With the agency's first sites launched on SharePoint 2007 more than two years ago, it was recently time to give the flagship Tourism WA sites a facelift! The corporate site (http://www.tourism.wa.gov.au) is the first site to move across to an interim look and feel as Marketing prepare for the formal brand re-launch; the consumer site (http://www.westernaustralia.com) will be following next week.

So how much effort was involved on the Corporate side? With no major content changes, it was really a question of modifying the existing CSS and and some of the images and other resources; all up, about a week's work—including a stack of minor content tweaks. Consumer has been more involved but I'll save that story for another post ;-)

New Sites, New Widgets

Rottnest Island Authority Re-launch

The second-last site to be launched on Tourism WA's fully branded, MOSS-based site provisioning platform went live last Thursday; I reckon it’s one of the best looking sites they've launched to date (the Rottnest Island photography helps, of course). Check it out: http://www.rottnestisland.com

[Update 22 July: As mentioned in my profile to the right, I'd like to clarify the fact the new rottnestisland.com web site is provided by Tourism Western Australia under the Tourism eMarketplace program; although I was involved in the technical construction of the web site as a contractor working for Tourism Western Australia, Mediawhole and mediawhole.com were NOT involved in the launch of this web site. Whereas I previously used the terms "we" and "our" in this post, I was referring to Tourism WA and teams working with the Rottnest Island Authority.]

Booking Exchange

On the subject of all things new, the new online booking capability has also launched on westernaustralia.com. The system integrates with our existing search function and provides live availability information from V3’s Open Booking Exchange. The politics around this apparently simple change were massive but the technology side was relatively straightforward by comparison (web service calls from within SQL Server are as complex as this got from our end). If you’re a tourism operator, find out more.

Travel Planner

The online travel planner was also finally launched after nearly a year of work with a Sydney-based agency. Luke was our man on the ground with this one and he did a great job integrating drop after drop of this widget.

The travel planner “helps visitors collect, organise and share their WA travel itineraries.” You can sign up from the westernaustralia.com homepage and add items from across the site to your travel wallet.

westernaustralia.com makes the top 10 MOSS sites

It was really cool to be listed on various MOSS-tracking sites back in the day when www.wwesternaustralia.com was launched nearly two years ago but to be picked out—on a top 10 list by Joel Oleson, next to Ferrari, Cadbury, and Engergizer, no less—at this point in time is incredible.

Joel in particular comments on our “great search” but I wonder if he knows it’s not running on MOSS search or the BDC? Searching for tourism western australia moss and tourism western australia bdc brings up some pesky, ancient postings by Angus Logan—a Softie who was previously involved with the site, our move from MCMS to MOSS, and the initial decision to do search with the BDC. These post would have you believe we’re running happily with the OOB MOSS search and the BDC; this is definitely not the case and we’ve actually written our own custom search solution.

If you’re interested in the custom branding work we do at Tourism, have a look at the list of Some of the MOSS sites I’ve Worked On in the sidebar. wa.com is certainly a last example but the other tourism sites have all been provisioned on the same farm from a single site def/feature set.

As a parting comment, looking at the number of heavily-customised MOSS sites out there these days, it occurred to me that maybe this stuff isn't really all that hard to do anymore ;-)