Wow, this is my first blogpost. So let me start of with a short introduction of myself. My name is Marcel Tielman and I am a passionate front end developer.
Recently I joined the zevenseas guys and I am anxious in getting into the SharePoint vibe. The guys injected me with the SharePoint flu.
After some knowledge sharing about SharePoint 2010 I noticed as a front-end guy the office ribbon. It’s great to see the office products are being integrated also from a UI perspective. One remark that I have is that Ribbon is consuming quite some screenspace, especially on smaller screen resolutions.
Did you know that you can double click on a tab of the ribbon itself, which hides the menu buttons? Unfortunately this hides menu buttons only but the ribbon space is still there unlike the Office client tools like word and excel.
So there you have it, the idea to minimize the ribbon space is born. The challenge for me was to use the screen / content space even more efficiently.
I came up with the Show/Hide Ribbon feature which enables you to easily show the ribbon or hide it when you don’t need it. The cool thing is that it even remembers the state (whether the ribbon is open or close) when you navigate from one page to another.
The solution is using jquery to write the panel for the ribbon, jquery is being added to the page via a usercontrol. Unfortunately it is not a sandbox solution because the usercontrol is being added via a delegate since I wanted to leave the masterpage alone.
I am already working on the next version which will be sandbox enabled by making use of Daniel’s awesome solution. You can grab this solution for FREE from codeplex.
I hope you will like it and please let me know if you have any feedback, questions or ideas.