Jan Tielens' Bloggings

A long, long time ago, back in the SharePoint 2003 days, I created some pretty popular web parts which filled in some gaps the out-of-the-box functionality left open. In SharePoint 2007 most of those web parts are obsolete; for example the Breadcrumbs web part is not necessary anymore since SharePoint 2007 has breadcrumbs by default. But a lot of people contacted me to ask for a SharePoint 2007 version of the What's New web part. This web part displayed a list of new and changed items on site. It's arguable that this functionality is not needed anymore because in SharePoint 2007 we have RSS feeds, the Content Query Web Part (MOSS only) etc. But apparently some people like the simplicity of the original What's New web part so much ... and just for those people I've create a new SharePoint 2007 What's New web part! :-)

Of course the new version is better and improved! Internally it's making use of the SPSiteDataQuery class so it can also aggregate new and changed items from multiple sites (recursive from the current level, or the complete site collection). The web part has following configuration parameters:

• Settings group
  • Number of items to show: determines the maximum number of items to show in the What's New web part.
  • Scope of the Query: determines where the What's New web part will check for new or changed items, possible values:
    • Site: the current site only
    • Recursive: the current site plus all the sub sites of the current site
    • Site Collection: the entire site collection of which the current site is a member
  • Cache interval: the number of seconds the results shown in the What's New web part will be cached. This cache is per user. After a change to the properties of the What's New web part, the cache is cleared automatically to reflect the changes.
  • Excluded Content Types: a list of content types which will be excluded from the results shown in the What's New web part. The list is separated with the ; character. For example "Folder;Task" will excluded all changes and additions of Folder and Task items.
  • Show header row: enables or disables the header row of the results list.
  • Group items on date: enables or disables grouping of the results based on their date
  • Allow group collapse: enables or disables the ability to collapse the groups if the Group items on date setting is enabled.
• Columns to show: you can choose which columns you want to show in the results list
  • Modified: the Modified timestamp, including the date and time
  • Time: the modified time (excluding the date part)
  • Date: the modified date (excluding the time part)
  • List: a link to list or document library containing the item
  • Site: a link to the site of the list or document library containing the item
  • Modified By: the account who changed or added the item

The installation is very easy (and completely documented), there is a setup wizard that will guide you through the process (thank you WSPBuilder and SharePoint Solution Installer!). For more information, download and source code; visit the SmartTools for SharePoint CodePlex site.