Displaying Blog Posts in Different Sites in SharePoint 2010

SharePoint blogs are no one’s favorite. There is just enough functionality there to make them useful, but not enough functionality to make them useful enough. On top of that, blogs are sites, not lists. That seems counterintuitive on one level – isn’t it just a list of posts? – but it makes sense on other levels. There are actually three important lists in a blog site: Posts, Comments, and Categories. There are two other lists as well – Photos and Links – but I rarely see them used in blog sites.

Because there are multiple lists and the site itself has some unique functionality, it actually does make sense that it is a separate site that uses a unique Site Template.

One problem with this is that it is then difficult to display blog posts in other sites. Sure, you can use the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) to do it, but the display options out of the box are pretty abysmal. Other options are an RSS Web Part or even search.

However, if you want to display blog posts elsewhere with any sort of fidelity, you will probably want to use a Data View Web Part (DVWP).

In this post, I’ll show you the quick steps to make that work, without much beautification. I’ll assume you already have your blog site up and running. The basic idea is that we will created a DVWP in the blog site, make a few manual edits to it, and then copy it into a page in another site. One note: I’m a bit more of a hack, so I would shortcut past a few of these steps. I’m trying to make it very straightforward and involving as little manual coding as possible.

Step 1: Create the DVWP

Open the blog site with SharePoint Designer. The home page of the blog site is default.aspx, so make a copy of that page and edit it in Advanced Mode. You’ll want to use the Design View or Split View for this. Enjoy them now, as they are gone in SharePoint Designer 2013!

On the ribbon, choose Insert / Data View / Empty Data View. If you choose a list at this point, you’ll end up with an XLV Web Part instead, which won’t work for our purposes because they cannot pull information from other sites – only DVWPs are good for this. Click on the ‘Click here to select a data source’ link and choose the Posts list.

Add whatever columns you’d like to display in your DVWP as a Multiple Item View. For this example, I’ve chosen Title, Created, and Created By.

Right click on the Title column and choose Format item as / Hyperlink to / Display form. The link will have a hard-coded URL, which is bad, but remember we’re just doing the basics here. It’ll work to get you to the actual post for the other site.

Make whatever other changes you’d like in the DVWP (Paging, Item Limits, column formatting, etc.), save the page, and test it in the browser. You should see your DVWP where you inserted it in the page. Mine is right up top:

Step 2: Modify the DVWP’s DataSource

Once you have the DVWP showing what you’d like to see, we have a couple more things we need to do to the DVWP to make it work in the other site.

Somewhere in the code for the DVWP, you’ll see the DataSources section. It’ll look something like this, depending on how you’ve formatted the DVWP:

<DataSources>
  <SharePoint:SPDataSource runat="server" DataSourceMode="List" UseInternalName="true" UseServerDataFormat="true" selectcommand="&lt;View&gt;&lt;/View&gt;" id="dataformwebpart1">
    <SelectParameters>
      <WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{AEC1CA2C-EFA6-4218-A742-5939F94E0DDE}"/>
      <asp:Parameter Name="StartRowIndex" DefaultValue="0"/>
      <asp:Parameter Name="nextpagedata" DefaultValue="0"/>
      <asp:Parameter Name="MaximumRows" DefaultValue="10"/>
    </SelectParameters>
    <DeleteParameters>
      <WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{AEC1CA2C-EFA6-4218-A742-5939F94E0DDE}"/>
    </DeleteParameters>
    <UpdateParameters>
      <WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{AEC1CA2C-EFA6-4218-A742-5939F94E0DDE}"/>
    </UpdateParameters>
    <InsertParameters>
      <WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListID" ParameterKey="ListID" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="{AEC1CA2C-EFA6-4218-A742-5939F94E0DDE}"/>
    </InsertParameters>
  </SharePoint:SPDataSource>
</DataSources>

We need to add the WebURL parameter, as I describe in my older post Using a DataSource in a Data View Web Part (DVWP) in a Different Site in SharePoint Designer 2010. You should use the relative path to the blog site as the value. In my case, it’s “/sites/demos/blog”.

The end result should be something like this:

<DataSources>
  <SharePoint:SPDataSource runat="server" DataSourceMode="List" UseInternalName="true" UseServerDataFormat="true" selectcommand="&lt;View&gt;&lt;/View&gt;" id="dataformwebpart1">
    <SelectParameters>
      <WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="ListName" ParameterKey="ListName" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="Posts"/>
      <WebPartPages:DataFormParameter Name="WebURL" ParameterKey="WebURL" PropertyName="ParameterValues" DefaultValue="/sites/demos/blog/"/>
      <asp:Parameter Name="StartRowIndex" DefaultValue="0"/>
      <asp:Parameter Name="nextpagedata" DefaultValue="0"/>
      <asp:Parameter Name="MaximumRows" DefaultValue="10"/>
    </SelectParameters>
  </SharePoint:SPDataSource>
</DataSources>

Note that you can delete the DeleteParameters, UpdateParameters, and InsertParameters sections because we’re only displaying data in the DWP (SelectParameters are used for that).

You’ll also need to remove the listname attribute in the DVWP header, which will look something like this:

listname="{AEC1CA2C-EFA6-4218-A742-5939F94E0DDE}"

Save the page again and test it in the browser. Nothing should have changed and the DVWP should be working just fine.

Step 3: Export the DVWP

I usually just copy and paste the DVWP code from one SharePoint Designer window to the other, but here we’re going to use the Export / Import mechanisms instead.

You should already have the page open, so simply click in the upper right corner of the DVWP and choose Export.

In IE(, I get this prompt

and I just choose to save the Posts.webpart file somewhere I’ll be able to find it again.

Step 4: Import the DVWP into the Other Site

Now we’ll add the DVWP to the other site. Navigate to the page where you’d like to display the DVWP, and put the page into Edit Mode. Position the cursor where you’d like the DVWP and on the ribbon, choose Insert / Web Part.

I’m going to add mine right under the intro text on a Team Site. You’ll see that there’s an option to Upload a Web Part, which I’ve highlighted below. Click on that, browse the the Posts.webpart file you saved in Step 3, and then click upload.

You’ll have to reply to a prompt to save the page and then you’ll be right back at the page without your DVWP. What? Yeah, some bad UI here. But you should see a new Category called Imported Web Parts, and your Posts Web Part should be listed there. (I uploaded twice by accident in the screen grab below, but you get the idea.) You can insert the Posts DVWP wherever you’d like in the page.

As I mentioned, you can also copy and paste the DVWP code from one page to another, depending on your comfort level.

Next Steps

Now your users can read blog info wherever you’d like to display it, without going to the blog site itself. If you’d like to, you can format the posts anyway you’d like in the DVWP, of course. To keep things simple, I’m just displaying some basic info in a list-oriented view. You could mimic the display from the blog site or anything else that tickles your fancy.