Provisioning Layout and Static Content for Office 365 SharePoint Wiki Pages Using PnP PowerShell

Here let us look how to add text to the wiki pages using text layouts with predefined text. In the samples, let us use PnP PowerShell scripts to create a wiki page, apply default layout and for adding content.

Problem Statement: Programmatically creating or updating wiki pages which uses OOB wiki page layouts with some predefined text. This is easily possible with manual actions. While creating a page using client side scripts, adding content to the page is not feasible. So, let us look how to add the text to the created wiki pages programmatically using PnP PowerShell scripts.

Applying Wiki Page Layouts with Content

The following are the points to be considered for adding text to wiki pages.

• Create a Wiki Page (This is required if the page doesn’t exist already)
• Retrieve the wiki page to be updated – Using CAML query to get the required page list item.
• Apply text layout with predefined text to a retrieved wiki page.

Before getting into operations, let us connect to the SharePoint site using PnP PowerShell using the following snippet.

Create a wiki page: Let us programmatically add a page to a SharePoint site using PnP PowerShell script. The following snippet creates a page with the required layout.

Note: Skip the above step if wiki page is already created.

Creating Page Layouts with Rich HTML Field Editors on Office 365 SharePoint

You would have seen several articles for creating page layouts with custom content types. But in this article let us look how to provision page layouts with multiple rich text fields.

Problem Statement: OOB publishing HTML field (Rich Field Text Column) can be used to create the content type for page layouts manually. But if you require more than one Rich Field Text Column, then we need to create those publishing HTML field programmatically.

Create Page Layout with Rich HTML Fields:

The following are the points to be considered while creating page layouts.

• Create Site Columns
• Create Site Content type
• Add Site Columns to the Content type
• Create Page Layout using the Content type.

Since few properties needs to enabled on a field, this is only possible with programming way. The field XML is built and then the field is created using the field XML.

This approach might be possible in multiple programming ways including PowerShell, CSOM PowerShell, CSOM, JSOM or REST API. But in the samples below, let us use PnP PowerShell for provisioning required components.

Customize People Picker Columns on Office 365 SharePoint Lists using OOB Column Formatting

Microsoft enables developers to format the SharePoint columns using JSON on the OOB list views. It is achieved using column formatting feature, which is available on the Office 365 SharePoint modern sites so far. The way the fields are displayed can be changed with the help of column formatting.

Column formatting helps in rendering the fields with customized view and style. There is no complex customization or coding involved in applying the column formatting.

In this scenario, let us look customizing the SharePoint user field column, available on a list. By default, user names will be displayed with hyperlinks on the SharePoint list views. The hyperlinks will lead to the user profiles. For example, we will hide the default user hyperlink text and show the picture of user along with user name using column formatting.

This customization is only possible with modern views of SharePoint list. Current view of the list will be,

SharePoint Modern List View