Removing the Default Editor Parts from SharePoint Web Parts

I was recently asked how to remove the Editor Parts (Appearance, Layout, Advanced, etc) from custom Web Parts.

One strategy is to implement your own Editor Part and mark the built-in ones as not Visible.

Firstly, we need to create our Editor Part class:

class MyEditorPart : EditorPart
{
    protected override void CreateChildControls()
    {
        // this line hides the default EditorParts
        Parent.Controls[2].Visible = false; 
        base.CreateChildControls();
    }

    public override bool ApplyChanges()
    {
        // do stuff here
        return true;
    }

    public override void SyncChanges()
    {
        // do stuff here
    }
}

And here’s how we invoke our Editor Part from our Web Part:

public class MyWebPart : WebPart
{
    public override EditorPartCollection CreateEditorParts()
    {
        ArrayList aryParts = new ArrayList();

        MyEditorPart myEditor = new MyEditorPart();
        myEditor.ID = this.ID + "_myEditorPart";
        aryParts.Add(myEditor);

        return new EditorPartCollection(aryParts);
    }
    // do more stuff here...
}

Hopefully, when you edit the Web Part it should look something like this:

The next step would be to extend CreateChildControls(), ApplyChanges() and SyncChanges() to get and set any properties you’d like to allow users to edit.