How to create a Tile view on modern SharePoint lists

Modern SharePoint lists just received the option to include a Tile view to display data on a modern and good-looking layout.

The Tile view is available on document libraries for a long time but the one released for lists is a bit different. While on libraries the layout is pre built by Microsoft on the lists you will have to build your own using the list view formatting feature.

If you are new to the list View Formatting, I strongly recommend you start by reading the official documentation here and here to get familiar with the JSON schema.

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By João Ferreira Sep 11, 2019 Branding, Office 365 17 Comments

How to easily deploy the list view formatting templates built by the community

List view templates are JSON structures that allow you to customize the views on SharePoint lists creating HTML components that represent each item.

The SharePoint community has been sharing a lot of this templates on GitHub but if you want to try them on your own environment you will need create the lists with the same exact column names, add data to the lists and then apply the JSON to format the view.

With more than 20 templates available this can easily take a few hours to build all the lists and add all the templates.

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By João Ferreira Sep 8, 2019 Branding, Office 365 9 Comments

Create a Fabric UI card layout on modern SharePoint pages

I’ve spent most of my professional life building custom intranets using classic publishing sites with custom page layouts and one of the features that was often requested was the card effect around the web parts.

While this was very simple to implement with custom page layouts on classic SharePoint, on modern SharePoint things are a bit different and require a different approach that I’ll explain in this article.

The instructions on this article will provide you a card layout like what is available on the modern Admin Portal.

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By João Ferreira Sep 3, 2019 Branding, Development, Office 365, SharePoint 6 Comments

Change modern SharePoint fav icon using Tenant Wide Deployment

I’m updating some of my old projects to take advantage of the latest functionalities of the SharePoint Framework and today I’m revisiting the solution that changes the favicon on modern SharePoint sites.

The previous solution was built using the framework 1.4.0 and allows you to change the favicon on individual site collections, the solution I’m providing today was updated to version 1.7.1 to take advantage of the tenant wide deployment functionalities.

This means that with a single deployment you will be changing the favicon globally on all your modern SharePoint sites.

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By João Ferreira Feb 24, 2019 Branding, Office 365 0 Comments

Convert Classic root sites to Modern SharePoint

Recently I’ve got a few requests to transform classic root team sites with publishing enabled into modern SharePoint sites.

The technic described in this article allows you to keep all your existent content, and at the same time allows you to take advantage of the out of the box responsive layouts and modern web parts.

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By João Ferreira Feb 5, 2019 Branding, Development, Office 365 44 Comments

Highlight events on Modern SharePoint with images

Do you need to draw the attention of your Intranet users to certain upcoming events on your calendar?

If your answer is ”Yes!”, then this article explains you how to take advantage of modern SharePoint to promote events in a compelling way, using images in your intranet pages.

Modern SharePoint has a dedicated web part to display events on modern pages. However, in the back everything is stored on classic SharePoint calendars, with a few extra columns added to build the modern detail page.

For each event created through the web part, you can define an image that although used in the header of the detail page is not visible in the web part itself, making it less immediate for end users to identify and therefore less engaging.

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By João Ferreira Oct 21, 2018 Branding, Office 365 3 Comments

SharePoint branding in 2018 – What are the available options?

SharePoint branding is one of the most controversial subjects on SharePoint world. There are pros and cons of doing it and there are several different ways to apply your brand to SharePoint as explained in this article.

Branding is often used to change the way SharePoint looks like and to make it aligned with the corporate visual identity. Doing this type of customizations can bring extra functionalities to the product and most importantly can increase the user adoption of SharePoint.

Besides all the positive aspects it can also have a negative impact on SharePoint if not done correctly depending on the branding method used you can easily loose default functionalities or even worse break the entire site.

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By João Ferreira Sep 9, 2018 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 4 Comments

Change favicon on Modern SharePoint sites

Favicons are associated to a website and are used to easily identify it from the address bar or bookmarks.

Changing the SharePoint default favicon on classic SharePoint usually involves a modification of the master page as explained here, this option is not available on modern sites but it’s still possible to modify it using an Application Customizer.

In this article you will find detailed instructions on how to create the application customizer as well as the final solution ready to be installed on your system.

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By João Ferreira Aug 24, 2018 Branding, Development, Office 365 15 Comments

Customize SharePoint menus with Fabric UI icons and images

Today I’m revisiting one of the first articles and customizations I did for SharePoint, a couple years ago I wrote a custom script to personalize SharePoint menu with icons using Font Awesome.

My previous solution was not easy to setup and had a few dependencies that might not work for all users, to overcome this I’ve decided to write a new version that automates the entire process and provides interfaces to manage the icons.

Since the release of the first solution a lot changed on SharePoint and Microsoft provided its own front-end framework, with this in mind I decided to replace Font Awesome by Fabric UI Icons.

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By João Ferreira Jul 1, 2018 Branding, Development, Office 365 16 Comments

Apply SPFx extensions to SharePoint Hub Sites using PnP PowerShell

Hub sites brig a set of common functions to all sites that belong the hub, but extensions are not propagated to all sites automatically.

With PnP PowerShell is possible to automate the installation of Application Customizers through the sites, the script below search for all sites associated with hub and apply the custom action to all of them.

Before running the script, you will need to have PnP PowerShell installed, the latest version can be installed from here.

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By João Ferreira May 13, 2018 Branding, Office 365 1 Comment