Intelligence Among Us

When creating a new Page Layout for a MOSS 2007 publishing site recently I stumbled across an interesting phenomenon that I thought I would share in with the intention of saving others some grief.

This thread will preface a more in depth analysis of the MOSS 2007 Publishing Infrastructure which will be coming in the near future.  Back to the issue at hand….

I created a new page layout in SharePoint Designer with the intention of using it as the Welcome page for my site.   As I was configuring the web parts on the page through the SharePoint UI, I made a slight modification to the page layout and saved it.  I refreshed the page in the browser and all the web parts that I had placed on the page had disappeared.   Perplexed (which is my typical state of mind), I took at look at the web part maintenance page (~URL/page.aspx?contents=1)  and discovered that all the web parts were present on the page but were not in use.  Placing the page in edit mode indicated that there were no web parts on the page.  I deleted the web parts from the web parts maintenance page.

When readding the web parts and publishing the page I asked the user to log in to verify the page was inline with her expectations and she reported the following error which I was not receiving. 

To make a long story longer it turned out the issue was in fact that I had not identified the id property of the web part zones in SP Designer.  SP Designer assigned an id to them as indicated in the image below. 

I believe what was happening is that the id’s were being recreated when saving the page thereby resulting in the web parts being assigned to zones that no longer “existed”.  The solution turned out to be as simple as creating a new page layout and assigning a distinct id’s for each.