My Insights

This issues is most common if you are making a Sharepoint site that is anonymously accessible but should allow administrators to login on any page to make edits.

Here is how to remove the “Sign In” link in Sharepoint and still keep the the Site Actions menu on the top.

1. Open the site’s master page in Sharepoint Designer
2. Look for the <td colspan=”2″ class=”authoringRegion”> tag. The best way to do this is to search for “authoringRegion”. Here is what this td tag should look like:

   
   

3. Encapsulate this tag with a  <PublishingWebControls:AuthoringContainer runat=”server”>. The new code should look like this:

   
   

4. Now go down to the footer of your page (or any other place where you would like to relocate your Sign In link and paste in the following:

   <a href=”javascript:authenticateUser()”>Admin Login</a> 
   

5. As you can see, this new link is trying to invoke a javascript function. We need to add that in ourselves. Paste in the following Code:

    

That’s It! Now your Admins and/or managers can click the “Admin Login” link and the Site Action menu will still appear on top for authenticated users. For anonymous users, the Sign In link at the top right is now gone!

If you are seeing $Resources: on your page, then it means that Sharepoint can’t replace the $Resources macro with an appropriate string.

The first thing to check is if your feature.xml file contains a reference to a resource file such as this-

    DefaultResourceFile=”core”

The other thing to check would be to make sure that the particular resource that you are replacing actually exists within the resource file. For example, if you’re looking for $Resource:2000, make sure that your resource file contains a replacement string for it.

Microsoft decided to make a bunch of $Resource strings obsolete when they upgraded from Beta2 to Beta2TR so you might see a bunch of these when you upgrade your system.

Some web-facing sites may need to implement a blog as part of the hierarchy. There are a few things to keep in mind when trying to get an anonymous blog to work under a publishing site.

1. Make sure that in Central Administration > Application management, you have enabled anonymous acces on your web app
2. Make sure that you have enabled anonymous access in your site settings for the publishing root site
3. Disable the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature on your MOSS 2007 server*
   *It is CRITICAL to disable the ViewFormPagesLockDown feature BEFORE creating the blog site.
   
4. For your POSTS list, first disjoin the permissions from the root site and then edit the anonymous access settings to let anonymous users view blog posts
5. If you want comments by unauthenticated users, disjoin the permissions from the rooth site and then enable view and add permissions for anonymous access users
6. Repeat the permissions process for any other relevant lists that you want