Category: WSS 3.0

Web Part Page Maintenance – Get rid of that broken web part

By , August 10, 2009

So, what happens when you are making a web part and despite your awesome coding prowess something goes wrong that prevents the page from rendering? It is kind of hard to change a setting on the web part when you can’t get to its editor window right? Well, the smart guys at Microsoft thought of this and included a “Web Part Page Maintenance” page for just such an occasion. At this page, you get a list of every web part that is added to the page and the ability to close, delete or reset them.

To get to this page, simply type “?contents=1″ at the end of the broken page URL.

Example: http://SharePoint/site.aspx is the page with the broken web part on it. Stick “?contents=1″ at the end of the URL to get http://SharePoint/site.aspx?contents=1

(Note: This will redirect the page to the layouts folder, opening spcontnt.aspx with the URL of the requesting page being sent in the new URL as a parameter. You could open this page directly, but its a lot easier to remember contents=1)

So, you will hopefully get a page like the one shown below. Now just delete the web part that is causing the problem and you are back in business.

Web Part Maintenance Page