Hi all.
I recently discovered Paul’s Blog and was very interested in his article explaining how to hide page components using JavaScript and deploying the functionality as a feature. In part 3 of the 6-part article, Paul demonstrates a way of exposing Administrative pages in "edit mode" view – a problem I have had every now and again, but I was unaware there was a solution for it except to crack the page open in SP Designer.
Once you are at the page you want to add a web part to, add the following to the URL:
To change everyone’s view of a particular page, append ?PageView=Shared&ToolPaneView=2 to the URL.
To change your private view of a particular page, append ?PageView=Personal&ToolPaneView=2 to the URL (this will only work on pages that allow you to have a personal view – to see if you can edit a personal view of a page, go to the page and click on the top right context menu beside the "Welcome, <your name>" link to see if there’s a menu option called "Personalise this page").
More info on the URL switches can be found here – http://blogs.msdn.com/danielmcpherson/archive/2004/10/11/240863.aspx – they relate to 2003, but they all seem to work on 2007 as well.
I keep searching for this using google search and failing to find it, so now I’m going to flood it with keywords in the hope it comes up next time I need this string… admin flyout menu page view querystring tool pane shared personal 
Cheers!
Brad
This is always so helpful – I keep forgetting WHAT the URL is to do this (I\’ve known about it for years) but I also keep forgetting what to Google when I need to find it again. Today I found your blog. (hint: the google search terms I used were \’append url sharepoint document library view edit mode\’)
For my particular need, I want to add a list web part to the left of the main explorer/list view of a document library so people can have a form web part or connection to the document library view to see specific documents. For example, if you have a list of customers and you also have a document library with a column of "customer name", selecting the customer name from the list on the left will filter the list of documents on the right.
So now I re-know how to go into edit mode; all that remains is how to add another zone on the allitems.aspx view page so I can actually have the list web part on the left instead of on the top
Hey Wayne, glad I could help. That\’s basically why I run this blog – to help me keep track of all those little things that are so annoying to forget, but forget them I will
Have you looked at creating a modified master page with a new zone using SP Designer to solve the last problem you mention? Gotta admit, I have not spent much time modding up pages, but I reckon you\’d be able to make it work. Just crack open the master page for the allitems.aspx and have a fiddle I suppose.
Good luck!