There was a request to display items (“How-To Tips”) based on a date range. Seemed like a reasonable request, but I didn’t see anything out of the box that provided this functionality. To get this done, the obvious choice was to use the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) and create a custom list that contained the tip items. In the custom list, I created the columns: Tip Description, Tip URL (in case a tip linked to another page/site), Display Start Date and Display End Date and Background Image (the requester also wanted a pretty image for the background of this web part).
Now that I had those columns to work with, I added a CQWP to the page and edited the web part to use my custom list:
To get the date range functionality, I used the Additional Filters section and my Date columns to filter on items with a Display Start Date less than or equal to [Today] and a Display End Date greater than or equal to [Today].
All that is left to do is add items to the list that have the correct start and end dates and the tip(s) appear on the web part:
There is more to do with getting the background image. I will blog that someday.
Chris "Jake" Jacobsen 