Hide People Picker control in SharePoint List Forms

I am working on a project that requires the SharePoint OOB "People Picker" control to be hidden in a List Form Page. In my case, this control was in the "NewForm.aspx" page. But you can use the same code for hiding this control in the "EditForm.aspx" page as well.

I used the following online resources to figure out the JavaScript code to hide the "People Picker" control:

http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2007/06/13/using-javascript-to-manipulate-a-list-form-field.aspx

http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2008/02/07/more-sharepoint-branding-customisation-using-javascript-part-1/

Here is the JavaScript code. Insert this code in the "Source Editor..." window in a Content Editor Web Part.

IMPORTANT: Insert the JavaScript OR operator () after the identifier == "" portion in the
if() statement in the getTagFromIdentifierAndTitle() function below. For some odd reason the OR operator gets removed whenever I publish the post.

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

_spBodyOnLoadFunctionNames.push("hideFields");

function hideFields() {

var control = getTagFromIdentifierAndTitle("Textarea","UserField_downlevelTextBox","People Picker");

control.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.parentNode.style.display="none";

}

function getTagFromIdentifierAndTitle(tagName, identifier, title)
{

var len = identifier.length;

var tags = document.getElementsByTagName(tagName);

for (var i=0; i < tags.length; i++)

{

var tempString = tags[i].id;

if (tags[i].title == title && (identifier == "" tempString.indexOf(identifier) == tempString.length - len))

{

return tags[i];

}

}

return null;

}

</script>

NOTE: The "People Picker" control was embedded 12 levels "deep" from the <tr> tag in my NewForm.aspx, and hence I had to use the code in the hideFields() function with 12 "parent" references. I used the awesome Firebug tool to view this hierarchy and to also find out the elusive tagName, identifier, and title info for the People Picker control. The Firebug tool is a FireFox browser addon, and is incredibly helpful when you need to look at raw HTML and JavaScript code that renders SharePoint pages.