Now that SharePoint is out a bunch of us SharePoint nerds are champing at the bit to get it installed. One of the jobs of the trailblazers is to find the rough spots so the folks that follow don’t have to lose wagon wheels in them. This is one of those cases.
First, let me say that my investigation into this bug is very much in its infancy. I don’t know exactly what causes it, and it doesn’t seem to be completely reproducible. I wanted to get it out there in case anyone else is banging their head against a wall because of it. I also needed something to point at in my wiki of SP2. I’ll update this post and the wiki page as I learn more.
Now to the bug. In some cases adding a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) to a page breaks the ability to add more web parts to the page. The “Add Web Part” link is gray. Removing the CEWP from the page fixes it. It looks like this only happens if you modify the master page or CSS for the page. I haven’t seen it happen with out of the box pages. Here are a couple of screenshots to show what I saw:
In this shot we see a regular told Team site in SharePoint 2010. Service Pack 2 has been installed on the server. In the top right we are logged in to the page and we’re editing it. We are able to add web parts to the page. There are no CEWPs on the page. In the lower left we can see the page allows anonymous access, and that for anonymous users the ribbon is hidden. I used Randy Drisgill’s technique here to modify the master page to remove the ribbon for anonymous users. I used the same technique on this blog to help some Android devices render pages correctly. Everything is good.
Then I added a CEWP to the page and the wheels fell off.
I added an empty CEWP to the page and saved it. Then I opened it back up to edit it. The upper left browser shows that all the options are grayed out. The lower right shows the page still renders fine with the CEWP in it. Removing the CEWP fixes the page.
I’ve bounced this off of a few folks and they’ve all been able to reproduce it to varying degrees. There appear to be a couple different master page and CSS tweaks that trigger it, and a couple of webparts beside the CEWP that it happens with. It appears that SharePoint does some checks on the page before it lights up the “Add Webpart” box and for whatever reason the page now fails these checks. As I get more information and verify it I’ll add it to this blog post. If you have information to share, leave it in a comment below.
At the time of this blog post the latest SharePoint 2010 build is the August 2013 CU, build 14.0.7106.5000. It still has this problem.
Thanks,
tk
ShortURL: http://www.toddklindt.com/CEWPbreaksSP2010SP2