Interesting Read: The new content editor WebPart in SharePoint 2010
Recently, Sahil Malik wrote an interesting blog post entitled “The new content editor WebPart in SharePoint 2010” where he highlights the exciting new updates to the CEWP. Read the full post here.
I wrote years ago that I felt the most powerful web part in SharePoint’s gallery was the Content Editor. It gives the user full freedom to present content the way he/she chooses while not requiring HTML (i.e. “techie”) skills. One of the challenges with this empowerment, however, is that sometimes you are left to the limits of the technology. One example is the use of embedded url’s. Here’s an example… A business user leverages a CEWP to add a note to a team site that states “click here to go to our knowledge base” where ‘here’ is a fully qualified url to another site within SharePoint (acquired through copy/paste in the browser). The problem becomes when this portal is restored to another location (i.e. development server) that url stays the same. SharePoint was smart enough to alter the url’s of most other internal references but it was NOT able to alter url’s in the CEWP. The risk, of course, was that users of a test environment could unknowingly find themselves back in the production system (yes, I have seen this… Disaster caused by disaster recovery testing!). Since SharePoint 2003, I have advised business users and administrators on using relative url’s to ensure this type of misdirection does not occur (not the easiest lesson to teach to less techie savvy users). Now, SP2010 fixes that!
If I enter text in a CEWP with the following: This is a test of how url mapping works and set ‘url’ to be http://testserver/sites/mauro/Pages/default.aspx (another page in my SharePoint 2010 environment) and save then go back into the html of that web part I see that the url is actually ‘/sites/mauro/Pages/default.aspx’. Yeah!
To me, as small as this feature might seem, it is a big deal… it proves that the folks in Redmond are actually making this a more useful and impactful business tool…