In previous versions of SharePoint it was impossible to add corners to a Web Part with just CSS (unless you were building sites for only the latest browsers). The best way was to style a container DIV on the Page Layout and put a Web Part Zone inside. Then, a Web Part in that zone would appear to have round corners. This method greatly reduces the flexibility of SharePoint because there can only be one Web part in each Zone for the effect to work.

Styling Web Parts in SharePoint 2010 has become much easier than in MOSS 2007. There are several reasons for this and I will highlight a few.

The addition of a style class on a cell that contains the entire Web Part gives a big advantage to adding styles. In MOSS this did not exist. This is helpful because now you can simply add a border, background image or color to the container cell with the class “s4-wpcell-plain” and it will be applied around and behind the body and header of the Web Part.

PointBridge Blogs – Office 2010 Wave

The backgrounds in SharePoint 2010 were designed to allow end users to change gradients by simply picking solid colors on the settings page. For example if you choose an orange background color the result is a fade from orange to lighter orange. The change can be very subtle but is an effective way to create an attractive site. This is a significant upgrade from older versions of SharePoint where, in order to change the branding, you would have had  to undertake the time-consuming task of editing all of the gradient images one by one.

PointBridge Blogs – Office 2010 Wave

Project Description
Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010 are a clean, commented starting point for creating your own SharePoint 2010 branding. Starter Master Pages were known previously as Minimal Master Pages in SharePoint 2007.
Project Details
In the tradition of those SharePoint branding folks that came before me, I have put together two minimal master pages that can be used to start a SharePoint 2010 Branding project. They contain only very minimal HTML styling in order to accommodate some of the specific needs of SharePoint 2010 and are commented throughout. I hope you find them useful as a good starting point for creating branded SharePoint sites. If you make improvements upon them that could be used to improve the Starter Master Page experience for others, please share the changes with me through the CodePlex site or through my blog comments.

Starter Master Pages for SharePoint 2010

I’ve prepared a SPSEMEA Demo site that you can simply upload to your (http://[siteUrl]/_catalogs/wt) Site template gallery.

You can download the .stp from CodePlex

After you’ve uploaded the file to the Site template gallery you can create a subsite (English language) and from Custom you can select the uploaded template.

Below’s a brief overview where you can find tricks. How it’s done – check for Content Editor WebParts in that page (using a “PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2” parameters in url (more info here)). All the files containing code are in a document library Sys.

SPSEMEA Demo site and showcase | SharePoint

Simply put, this plug-and-play solution will add a “+” or “-” to every web part in a given web part zone, allowing users to click the web part title to control the visible state of the web part.  You can control the default state of each web part by setting the Chrome State on the web part.

Collapsible Web Parts in a Zone Using jQuery for SharePoint 2007 « SPUIGuy

This article is part of a series as I document my processes of discovery for creating jQuery solutions in SharePoint. To view the entire series, click the link at the bottom of this article to view all of the articles in the series. — Mark

I laid the groundwork for my jQuery investigations in a previous article. Now that I’ve done a little research, I’ve started building out a SharePoint Scripting Resource Center. The SSRC is at the top of the site collection, and set to “Read Only” access for all users of the site collection. I used a SharePoint wiki site to build the interface for the center.

In this article, I’ll walk through the process of creating a resource center. Follow along in your own SharePoint site and by the time you get done, you’ll be ready to start working on some jQuery with me.

Build a SharePoint Scripting Resource Center | EndUserSharePoint.com

During the course of a customization and branding effort in SharePoint you are likely to find that you want to style web parts to look different from (Dare I say better than?) the stylistic treatment default to SharePoint.

In my quest for finding a way to improve the look of web parts, I discovered Microsoft’s markup for web parts does not allow for much web part style manipulation, as there are not enough CSS hooks.  Nor could I modify the HTML inside a web part zone in order to wrap web parts with <div> tags for styling purposes—you can’t edit the contents of web part zone directly.  So I had to settle with wrapping <div> tags with classes around web part zones, which got me where I wanted to go somewhat, but it failed to allow me to apply treatments like background colors, borders, rounded corners, and drop shadows to individual web parts—I could only apply them to the wrapper around the web part zone.

Using jQuery to Wrap Web Parts and Achieve the Unachievable: The Packaged Solution | EndUserSharePoint.com

In One Line

Develop and centrally manage Sharepoint user interface customisations using jQuery within SharePoint & MOSS (2007 and 2010) and Project Server (2007 and 2010).

Project Description

ShUIE is an addition to Microsoft SharePoint that allows a developer to inject JavaScript and CSS fragments depending on the context of the page being displayed. JavaScript and CSS injected can be optionally minified, and jQuery is included to increase functionality.

Project History

ShUIE was created by Pcubed in Autumn 2005, for SharePoint v2, to enable the customisation of the SharePoint HTML without requiring us to touch the template files and to allow us to apply and maintain the customisations over many SharePoint sub webs without having to re-deploy or modify the site templates. In the SharePoint v2 version, we injected the JavaScript by modifying a Microsoft Sharepoint core JavaScript file.
In early November 2008 we created a version for SharePoint 2007. It uses a WebControl to "inject" JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets into a page based on the context of the page. The customisations continue to be held centrally in a database, but now the ability to use a WebControl packaged as a feature means that we no longer modify any Microsoft file and still retain the ability to inject our customisations anywhere.
The latest version uses SharePoint’s property bag instead of a SQL database. It has been tested and is stable against SharePoint 2007, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010 and MOSS 2010.

ShUIE (SharePoint User Interface Extender)

SharePoint Infuser allows custom content, any content, to be inserted automatically on every page in a  SharePoint site collection. Infuser is a completely free product, you can download it and use it in your production environment free of charge with no strings attached.

Insert custom code with full syntax highlighting

In essence Infuser is used in a similar way to the many existing Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) ‘hacks’ published on the Internet. The main difference is that the CEWP must be added manually to every page in a site – which doesn’t scale – whereas Infuser inserts the code automatically on every page in the Site Collection.

For details and examples, read our blog posting.

Muhimbi – SharePoint Infuser – Automatically insert content into every page

One of the users of our SharePoint project asked if it was possible to show an “Item List” on the “View Item” page.

My first reaction was: “Of course it is, add a Web Part displaying the “Item List” to the page and we’re done”.

But when I browsed to the “View Item” page and clicked the “Site Actions” I noticed that there wasn’t an “Edit Page” option available. Strange, but after some -Googling- I found the following sollution:

• Open IExplorer and navigate to your “View Item” page (DispForm.aspx)
• Replace everything in the URL after “?ID=#“ with “&PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2″ (without the quotes of course) and press <Enter>

After adding a Web Part to the page and saving it, the “Edit Page” option will be available the next time you click “Site Actions” on that Page.

Add Web Parts to DispForm, EditForm or NewForm.aspx | Sharepointology