.NET life

If you want to allow your client insert more than just formatted text and images in his Publishing HTML field control, you should think about the out-of-the-box Reusable Content functionality provided by MOSS 2007.

Let’s take the following box for example:

The html for the box shown is as follows:

<div class="box">
    <div class="header">[HEADER]</div>
    <div class="content">
        [BEGIN CONTENT]
        <br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>
        <br/><br/><br/><br/><br/><br/>
        [END CONTENT]
    </div>
</div>

The html code is simple but you do not want the client to have to copy this code. When you create a site collection using the Publishing Site site definition, you should have a list called Reusable Content in your root site. You can navigate to it using View all site content in the Site Actions menu. We will create an item in this list that will be a template for our box.

Choose a Reusable HTML:

Turn off the automatic update. Use the edit html source on the html editor to paste in the previous html sample. Save the item and then approve it (the Reusable Content list has content approval turned on by default).

Now that we have our box html template in place, let’s go to our page that needs to have an instance of the box appear on it. Go to edit mode and locate your Publishing HTML field. Click the toolbar button Open a new window to Insert Reusable Content:

Select the item that we created earlier and press OK. If everything went well, an instance of the box with text placeholders has been inserted into your Publishing HTML field. All there is left to do is to place the cursor in the text placeholders and replace it with the actual content.