Manage Webparts on WSS & MOSS … the easy way

Suppose you’ve run into a situation with a hidden ”site actions” menu for some reason, and you want to modify the webparts on a webpart page… what would you do?

In this short & quick article i’ll show you a shortcut way to manage webparts in your MOSS site, with the use of URL query strings and parameters.

To open the Design Bar – Useful for pages in the Pages Library
http://www.yourwebsite.com/default.aspx?DisplayMode=Design

To turn on Web Part Zone Editing 
http://www.yourwebsite.com/default.aspx?ControlMode=Edit

To Correct or Remove Misbehaving Web Parts
http://www.yourwebsite.com/default.aspx?Contents=1

To Open the Page in Web Part Design Mode, or to add/browse webparts
http://www.yourwebsite.com/default.aspx?ToolPaneView=2

To Open the Search Web Part Zone, or to add/search webparts
http://www.yourwebsite.com/default.aspx?ToolPaneView=3

in addition, you could pass a second parameter to specify the pageview mode

Example(1) – if you wanted to edit the Shared view of the default page:
default.aspx?mode=edit&PageView=Shared

Example(2) – if you wanted to Browse web parts and add them to your Personal view:
default.aspx?ToolPaneView=2&PageView=Personal

Save site as template

Hi folks;

Long time i know, but really its a busy life.

What i want to present today is a little trick about saving your SharePoint site as a template, using the magic ”/_Layouts/”. specially when you want to save a sub site as a site template, so when you navigate to the site settings of this sub site, the option to save site as template does not appear.

So the tricky way to do this is by editing the URL of your SharePoint site by entering “/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx” at the end of it, like http://www.YoursiteURL.com/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx

After that, a webpage will appear asking you to enter TemplateName (will be saved as .stp file), and the name of the template to appear when you create a new website from that template.

And by doing this action, the template will be saved as a .stp file in the Site Templates Gallery in the parent website, found under Site Settings >> Galleries >> Site Templates.