Customizing SharePoint

I saw a MSDN evening session in june 2004 on SharePoint customization from Patrick Tisseghem but only found the time to
start playing around with Frontpage and SharePoint today,... well better late than never. It seems that there are a lot of things you have to think about when doing SharePoint customization, luckily I found a lot of information on the Internet.

• Of course the first thing I stumbled upon when playing around with SharePoint was the "Initializestrings method returned an incorrect number of strings" error when trying to modify the webpart properties from within Frontpage. Luckily Microsoft has a support article about this issue.
And another one which can be helpfull as well. (It seems that once you start fooling around with SharePoint the problems keep on coming,... luckily most of it can be avoided once you know them.)

• Next I found this article describing the problems with Frontpage customisation, the author of this article, Barry Kouda, has on the member pages of his site a word document which clearly describes the inner working of SharePoints site definitions.


• Daniel McPherson also has some nice blog entries which can help amongst them How to create a footer in SharePoint
  
• Serge van den Oever wrote a blogentry about the DataView webpart , this is indeed a great webpart to quickly create views upon XML data and you definitely need FrontPage if you want to work with it. There is also a great article on MSDN about this subject - Building XML data driven websites with Frontpage 2003

In the meantime I have messed up my SharePoint VPC image so much that I think I need a rollback,... well at least it has been fun....