Mike Smith over at Tech Training Notes had a nice simple post a few weeks back on changing the default text displayed at the bottom of stock web parts in SharePoint. For example discussion boards show this text when it's blank:
"There are no items to show in this view of the "Test" discussion board. To create a new item, click "New" above.
That's great but what if the "New" link isn't avaiable (if you turn off the full toolbar and put a discussion list on a page this would happen). Or what if you don't like calling it a discussion board (for various reasons) and want to say forum. Or want to provide additional information.
His solution is a little bit of JavaScript and then pushing his function into an array _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames (which is a list of scripts SharePoint will run when the page loads). Here's the original version:
1: <script type="text/javascript">
2:
3: function ChangeDiscussionMessage()
4: { 5: var a = document.getElementsByTagName("TD") 6: for (var i=0;i<a.length;i++)
7: { 8: if (a[i].className=="ms-vb")
9: { 10: if (a[i].innerText.indexOf("There are no items to show in this view")>-1) 11: { 12: a[i].innerHTML = "There are no active discussions";
13: }
14: }
15: }
16: }
17:
18: _spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("ChangeDiscussionMessage") 19:
20: </script>
Here's a more simplified jQuery version:
1: <script type="text/javascript">
2:
3: $(document).ready(function(){ 4: $("td .ms-vb:contains('There are no items to show in')").text('There are no active discussions'); 5: });
6:
7: </script>
P.S. I'm still trying to find time to write up the blog post from this last weekend's code camp and will post the SharePoint developer resources soon!