One of the main parts of
SharePoint you should become familiar with (if you haven’t already) is
the Site Settings. You can access the Site Settings page by clicking
the gear icon in the right-hand corner of the SharePoint site and then
selecting Site Settings. You’ll find most of the configurations for
your site on this page, so it’s a good place to start when trying to
understand where you can, for example, change the theme of your site,
activate features, manage permissions, and so on. Figure 1
shows the Site Settings page. Note that the core features of the Site
Settings page are split out into major categories. For example, most of
your security settings are available to you in the Users and
Permissions category, theming in Web Designer Galleries, and so on.
As you can see from Figure 1,
you can manage many functions through Site Settings. One of the key
tasks you’ll do as a developer or site administrator, for example, is
to view the permissions of an app. Permissions are core to SharePoint
and allow you to control who has access to specific areas and apps
within your site and also to provision augmented permissions for, say,
people you want to have editing capabilities on your site. To view the app permissions, click Site App Permissions under Site
Settings. Figure 2
shows this page. Specifically, you can see that a number of apps are
deployed to this SharePoint site, each with a specific identifier used
for permissions.
For those of you familiar with SharePoint 2007 or
2010, you also know that you can build “features,” which are a special
type of SharePoint solution that you can deploy. After you deploy them,
you can activate or deactivate features through a configuration page
within Site Settings. To see the Feature Gallery, click Manage site
features under Site Actions. Note that a number of features are either
activated or deactivated in this gallery. Site administrators (and
those who have full control over the site) can also use the Site
Features page as a place to manage the features in your SharePoint
farm. Figure 3 shows the Site Features page.
It you have some extra time, it is a good idea to
explore the different areas of the Site Settings page to become
familiar with all the configuration settings you can manage in
SharePoint.
Although you can use Site Settings to configure
elements of your SharePoint site, you can also directly edit your
SharePoint site. Editing a site enables you to accomplish many
different tasks, such as adding a Web part, adding HTML content to your
page, configuring apps, and so on. If you return to the home site of
your SharePoint site, click Site Actions ⇒ Edit Page. The functions
available to you at this point range from inserting apps to editing to
custom list generation. If you click inside the top-level Web part to
expose the in-context ribbon, you’ll see that you can now edit the page
using the ribbon controls. Thus, although the Site Settings provide you
with configurable settings for the applications that you deploy to
SharePoint (or for changing the configuration of the site that hosts
your applications such as themes or master pages), the Edit mode
enables those with elevated permissions to contribute to the
development of content on the site — see Figure 4.
The editing experience ranges from formatting
text to adding images or multimedia. For example, suppose you’ve
created a training video and you now want to embed that video in a Web
part on a page. You can use the Edit menu to add the video to the Web
page, where SharePoint will then provide you with the necessary
controls to play the video. Although this type of task might not
constitute hard-core, managed code development, you are still advancing
the content of your site, so in a sense you are technically
“developing” your site.
You can get a little more into the code by
embedding HTML directly within your SharePoint site when it’s in Edit
mode. This task feels a little more like development, so give it a try
in the following activity.
TRY IT OUT: Embedding HTML
To embed HTML into your SharePoint site, follow these steps:
1. Open your SharePoint site and navigate to the home page of the site.
2. Click the Page tab, and then click Edit ⇒ Insert.
3. Position your cursor on the page, and click Embed Code, as shown in Figure 5.
4. Add some HTML code into the code field, as shown in Figure 6.
5. Click Insert. The result will be similar to what’s shown in Figure 7.
6. Click Page ⇒ Save. This saves the HTML you entered to the SharePoint site as in Figure 8 — see the “Hello World!” text added inline.
How It Works
This exercise is a very simple example
to illustrate the ease with which you can enter HTML into your
SharePoint site and pages. You add code, and behind the scenes
SharePoint uses a special “container” that renders your HTML on the
SharePoint page.
The HTML container (or App part)
represents a way for you to add HTML source to the page. When the site
loads, the source is treated as a part of the page and is then
rendered.
Note that you’re not limited to only
HTML when embedding code on the page; you can add code such as
JavaScript that will also run when the page loads.
Let’s move on to something a little different and
add a video to a SharePoint site. This exercise serves to contrast the
more Web-based use of SharePoint with adding markup.
TRY IT OUT: Adding a Media Player App
To add a Media Player app to your SharePoint site:
1. Open your SharePoint site and navigate to the home page of the site.
2. Click the Page tab, and then click Edit ⇒ Insert.
3. Position your cursor on the page, and click Insert.
4. Click Web Part ⇒ Media Web Part, and then click Add. The result should look like Figure 9.
How It Works
SharePoint natively supports
multimedia as well as Silverlight, which you can use to create and
deploy rich media applications to SharePoint. Two main out-of-the-box
Web parts are available that are media-centric. The first is the
generic Silverlight Web part, which represents a “host container” for
Silverlight applications. The second is the Multimedia Web part, which
is in essence a Silverlight Web part that supports and serves the
multimedia that is associated with the Web part. So, in this exercise
you “mapped” a video with the Multimedia Web part, which further
enabled you to view the video when you clicked the play button. The
generic Multimedia control is nice in that it provides a set of
controls to play, pause, and stop the video as well as increase the
volume or toggle between thumbnail and full-screen views. The mapping
of the video essentially represents a source property that is being set
behind the scenes so that the mediaelement object, a native part of the Silverlight video-playing capabilities, understands where to find and play the video.
