Wednesday 23 May 2012

SharePoint 2010 - Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) Versioning

I've been seeing (and hearing) a lot of misinformation about the SharePoint 2010 Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) from people that assume it behaves exactly the same as it did in SharePoint 2007. This is also then used as a rationale as to why you should use page fields as part of page layouts (i.e. the "Page Content" field) to store content - "if you want versioning, you have to use page fields and page layouts. Period! CEWPs just don't support versioning". This is incorrect!

On the contrary, the SharePoint 2010 CEWP does support versioning and you can easily roll back to a previous version of a page with the content of all your Content Editor Web Parts still intact from that old version. It would appear that this is one of the less-well publicised "new" features of SP 2010.

While "page content" fields within page layouts (and their supporting content types) still have a role (when you want more control over layout or don't want javascript put into your pages), a more flexible combination of basic page layouts (e.g. for a column-based structure), with the CEWP provides for more options to end users - particularly when requirements are not set in stone (are they ever?).

Some entries on the blogosphere which indicate (erroneously) that content isn't versioned within CEWP in SharePoint 2010:
http://geekswithblogs.net/SoYouKnow/archive/2011/07/28/a-dummies-guide-to-sharepoint-and-jqueryndashgetting-started.aspx

http://dsgeorge2976.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/versioning-sharepoint-content-editor-webpart-content/

DDK

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