SharePoint Designer 2010 Best Practices

Destin Joy
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SharePoint Designer 2010 is the tool to configure and customize SharePoint 2010. In this session, we discuss some of the development scenarios where SharePoint Designer 2010 can be helpful and identify situations where using SharePoint Designer 2010 may be more of a burden than a help. Listing 2 shows some of the case scenarios for SharePoint Designer 2010.

No.	Best Practices	Comments
1	Avoid customizing a Pages based on a File in the “14” Hive.
2	Avoid installing SharePoint Designer 2010 on SharePoint Server
3	Before developing a new Web Part, check the following a. Is it already provided Out of the Box? b. Whether a Data View Web Part can be used
4	Do not edit the Out of the Box CSS files
5	Do not start customizing from Production directly.	It is recommended to develop the solution in the developer interface, and then migrate the solution to the development server. After thorough testing, the same should be migrated to staging and then Production
6	Do not delete files which are part of a previous solution. In case of any issues, the developer should be in a position to roll back to a previous solution.
7	Do not modify any system or application pages
8	Do not apply a custom master page to system application pages. When we change the master page, we have two options, site master page and system master page. Try to not change the system master page.
9	Avoid customizing pages which are frequently accessed and require less page load time.
10	Check out the page and do your modifications If editing an existing page: a. Create a Copy b. Make your Alterations to your Copyc. Make your Copy active
11	Web Part Properties in Web Part Zones are not versioned so be careful.
12	Enable versioning for the artifacts that are being customized. In case of any issues, this will help with rolling back to a previous version.

Recommendations

Do not allow end users (non-technical) to use SharePoint Designer
Reusable workflows should be exported to Visual Studio and then enhanced
Master page customizations done in SharePoint Designer should be exported to Visual Studio and a WSP should be created for deployment
In SharePoint Designer 2007, there was a packaging difference between .stp site templates and .wsp files. In 2010, only .wsp is the way to go.

Share View Styles and apply them from the Ribbon

You can easily share custom styles for your list views with others in the site collection by uploading the styles to the Style library in the top-level site in the site collection. Anyone with proper permissions can then use SharePoint Designer 2010 to apply these custom styles to their own list views with just one click.