Extending SharePoint Page Layout

Found this blog entry from Janne Mattila's regarding extending page layout to include your own funky stuff. The example given are for custom language change, dynamic master page change and dynamic page layout swapping. For my case, I needed to do this to capture statistics of page hits for specific pages. Refer to here for more details.

Hiding field controls in a page layout from presentation

I’ve been looking around on hiding some fields from the content page, and allowing editing only during edit mode. Finally found it on this blog, which states that there’s an EditModePanel under the SharePoint Server Controls in the Toolbox of SharePoint Designer. Everything that you drop into it will only be visible during edit mode of the page. So simple actually!

http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2006/12/23/5535.aspx