Hiding The Toolbar in Sharepoint 2010

The Toolbar is one of those in-between metaphors in the Sharepoint 2010 environment. It is designed to make things more comfortable for people used to Office 2010, yet it makes using a web metaphor complex and somewhat needlessly difficult. Here is how you hide it.

Why You Want To Hide It But Not Pull It Entirely
Really, Sharepoint is constructed to rely on the damn thing. Unfortunately, if people don't have permission to do shit on your site - and most of your users are readers, not contributors - you don't really want them poking around the various grayed-out links.

1. Pop open Sharepoint Designer and find the site you need to get into.
• Side nav - Master Pages
• Your custom master page from when you wiped the basic sharepoint page.
• Edit file
• Check out the file.
2. Look for this tag: <SharePoint:SPRibbon runat="server" PlaceholderElementId="RibbonContainer" CssFile="">
3. I like to label mine things like <!-- === THE RIBBON STARTS HERE == --> for future reference, but all that should be in your minimal master page.
4. The next thing to do is decide what permissions people should have before they can see your ribbon. I like "edit list items." 
1. <Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl ID="SPSecurityTrimmedControl2" runat="server" PermissionsString="EditListItems">
2. every other piece of ribbon content goes in here.
3. </Sharepoint:SPSecurityTrimmedControl>

So how does this work?

Permissioning is still your only job. You now have two groups of users, Everyone, who have read permissions and can't touch anything on the site, and whatever group you assign to have other permissions. In theory, this will work to control the whole site - the ribbon will just not be there when they log in. 

Sometimes You Just Need To Trust People

However, this means that you need to grant pretty high permissions to anyone who wants to edit anything on the site, and that includes things like, say, a calendar. For some reason, presumably because the ribbon is set at the master page level, you can't just issue edit list permissions on a specific list (everything in sharepoint is a list) and have the ribbon load properly on that list alone.

In theory, there is a provision for this by "allowing" people to "hide" or "display" the ribbon.

In practice, for the group you want to be able to edit and access that calendar (or list generally), create a group, give that group Edit List permissions on your site, and trust in the panopticon to let you know who, exactly, fiddled with what. They probably won't, you can definitely see what they did if they do, and turn on version control for the site. Welcome to systems administration, which - much like the future generally - is slightly less than promised.