I see dead pages

Who isn't afraid of ghosts? I am. Really. Disembodied spirits that aimlessly roam the Earth looking for souls to inhabit, haunt, or consume just isn't for me. However this post has nothing to do with ghosts but rather ghosting which strangely enough is not the art of hunting ghosts but rather touching SharePoint site pages using FrontPage.

There's been a fair amount of discussion on ghosting and unghosting pages in SharePoint. What it means, why should I do it, does it affect performance, etc. I'll leave those fabulous resources below alone on this but wanted to pass along a tip that I personally use to avoid ghosting completely.

  1. Create a web part page with just a single zone and put it into a scrap document library
  2. Place any web parts on that page and crack that page open in FP to do whatever you want with it (say convert it into a DVWP)
  3. Export the customized Web Part from the browser when you’re done all your modifications
  4. Import the DWP file back onto a normal site

Optionally you can delete the web part page you unghosted or the entire document library if you please. I keep mine around and use it as a sandbox so I’m not munging with my production sites in real-time with anything that end users would see. Works pretty well and never gets me into the place of having to re-ghost (using something like GhostHunter) my pages in a production site.

Here are a few great resources to get the big picture on ghosting:

And while we're talking about ghosts anyways, here's some great haunted house sites which have nothing to do with SharePoint:

1 Comment

  • We need to get things like this changed. I really think that if you have a page that isnt working, then you should not post it online with the words "under construction" because that is going to add more problems and just doesnt look professional.

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