Custom Layouts 101/LOL

Custom Layouts are one of those things you make once in Sharepoint and then never touch again. There are a lot of those things in corporate information design, which leads to much tut-tutting by consultants, but, for real: changing these things one they run well is made-up work. It is upsetting to your users when things change for no particular reason, although I suppose it might make them happy, briefly, to have a new logo, before they stop seeing the logo entirely because it relates not at all to their job of finding and editing the new loans agreement paperwork. Please be damn sure of your actual value addition before you start shoving things around from Tuesday boredom.

There are two basic views of a Sharepoint page, Edit and Read. You are the primary user of the Edit Page. Your user is the primary user of the Read Page. Your life goal is to be able to create a new splash page with all relevant bits and pieces in place in under ten minutes, that you can go back to writing your MFA on information theory and watching drones play catch on the internet.

Can I Create A Homepage That Automatically Pulls In, Say, A Calendar View And A Discussion Board?
No. You have to activate those as Site Features - templates that are available in your subsite - then create the relevant lists before you can call them. I expect you could program a custom Site Template that automagically turns on the appropriate Site Features then loads your desired List Types on the press of a button, but then you would have learned something and possibly have to admit to being Wrong About Sharepoint After All, and that cannot be.

Layouts are initially designed from the back end, in Sharepoint Designer, then pushed live, where you can include the most relevant webparts. There are some parts you can include back-end - anything that speaks to an extant list already loaded on your site, all content query webparts, that sort of thing - but you can't include views of document libraries or calendar lists, so you're pretty well just boned from the POV of backend development saving you front-end time.

Webpart You Can Have

File under Nice Things - you can have anything that rolls up data that's guaranteed to be there already. So things like the Content Query Webpart are fine. This is also where you'll be working with custom list-view webparts, may Satan have mercy on your soul. I like to force everyone in the company to see today's general announcements list, because secretly I am a reptile.

How To Backend Hurr Hurr Hurr
Do you have Visual Studio? Great, you're too competent for this blog, go away.

1. Open Sharepoint Designer 2010.
• 2007 had so many security holes many places refused to load it at all. 
2. Under the Master Page templates will be Page Layouts
1. Wait it's not there!
2. You made your site using the wrong sort of Site Template. 
3. Proceed directly to jail, no GO, no $200.
3. Find a page layout you kind of like by clicking around and wondering about yourself.
1. This will cause SPDesigner to lose its shit and try to crash.
4. Copy it and rename it "ProjectLayout" or whatever you will remember.
5. Edit This File, check it out, set your view to Split because this is like Dreamweaver, where you're going to learn to interpret their GUI gestures in both code and real time.
6. The code section will be yellowed out to protect the worthy. Select "edit in advanced mode" and it will go normal. Some things will realign themselves.
7. There are a lot of tags here that make no sense if you're used to semantic code.

Okay, so here we go: none of this makes sense or is documented in a really coherent way anywhere I have found it. There are certainly books you could buy, but you're at work already, so! Fun times are to be had. Know what you want, kind of? Great. You should create a subsite for yourself and begin applying random-ass page styles to it until the thing you want shows up. Yes, really. Then load the appropriate page layout into Sharepoint Designer and find the appropriate Secret Words, steal them, and paste them into your new layout.

Other Pointer: Do you remember when you loved semantic code and <DIV> tags and styling sites with CSS to float things around the page? Because I do not. Tables are your new friend, as whomever wrote this software was really big on tables. They are the simplest route to having web parts show up roughly where you want them, and as Sharepoint does not give a single fuck about bandwidth, usability, or mobile, you'll be just fine.

The below is a sample of a bog-simple page layout, but without any of the masses of tag prefixes you need to get the thing to run. As you can see, I do most of my customization in the browser itself, because my clients are not fond of shiny things and would much prefer to see, say, their calendar and their documents in the same page. Enjoy.