Update 07–11–2007: The beta period is now closed. I will continue to work on the feedback of users who are currently testing the webpart. On my new weblog I will post the updates and the 1.0 release in the coming weeks.

I have been working on a new web part that aggregates content of a specific content type into a gridview. Much like the Content Query web part, but easier to use by end-users. They just need to select the content type and the columns they want to be displayed (that’s why I called it “Content by Type”).

The most important features are:

– Works in WSS and MOSS
– Casting / formatting of column data types
– Links to items and its context in contextmenu
– Links to lookup / person fields
– Filter items using MOSS filter web parts
– Supports grouping/sorting and paging

The screenshot above shows the Content By Type webpart in action. The view displays 4 columns of this content type. The view is grouped by content type and sorted by Modified date. When configuring the webpart, users simply choose a content type and the web part lets them pick the columns they want. The screenshot below shows part of the configuration. Users can (un)select the available content type fields and configure the links for these fields. After configuring the other web part properties (scope, grouping, sorting, list type, etc.) the web part will query for items that match the selected content type(s) and display the results in a grid.