MSDN Magazine - July 2008 - (Page 43)

Ted PATTiSon Office Space Automated SharePoint Site Branding There is one request I have heard often since I Things get better when you use the Sharebegan working with SharePoint® technologies. Point Designer together with MOSS because Rather than using standard SharePoint sites, MOSS provides a Web Content Management companies often want to create unique sites. (WCM) infrastructure through the use of pubWhether you are using SharePoint technololishing portals. A MOSS publishing portal is a gies to create your company’s Internet-facing site collection containing publishing sites that Web sites or an intranet environment with huncan automatically synchronize pages across all dreds of team collaboration sites, you might the sites to use the same Master Page and the be asked to manage the visual aspects of your same CSS file. SharePoint sites such as page layout and the use However, it is important to keep in mind that of fonts and colors. using the SharePoint Designer has some noteWindows® SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 worthy limitations when it comes to creating a provides branding through themes. A user branding solution intended for use across mulcan apply a WSS theme to a site to change its tiple site collections or in enterprise scenarios. appearance. Note that themes in WSS are enRemember that changes made with the Sharetirely different from themes in ASP.NET. WSS Point Designer are always made as one-off cusimplements its infrastructure for themes by tomizations within the context of a particular copying a cascading style sheet (CSS) file from site. This means a customization made with the the file system of the Web server into the conSharePoint Designer can be tricky or impossible text of the current site and dynamically linking to migrate between site collections or between to this CSS file from each page. farms. Also, it’s impractical to integrate site cusWSS themes have limitations that make them tomizations made with SharePoint Designer less interesting to developers. The first limitation into a source code management system such is that WSS themes cannot integrate a custom as Visual Studio® Team System. Master Page to customize the page layouts used This month I am going to walk through deFigure 1 LitwareBranding Solution within a site. Furthermore, a WSS theme can in Visual Studio veloping a custom branding solution for Shareonly be applied on a per-site basis as opposed Point sites that leverages the capabilities of WSS to across a site collection. There is no support to perform a single to integrate custom Master Pages and custom CSS files at the level action that applies a theme to all the sites within a site collection. of the site collection. I am going to walk through the code within Instead, you would have to go to each site separately and apply the a sample branding solution named LitwareBranding that has been same theme to maintain a consistent appearance and functional- developed using a Visual Studio project and that is deployed usity across a site collection. ing a solution package. You can find all the code in the code downThe SharePoint Designer provides another means for branding load for this issue. sites in WSS or Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Employing Visual Studio and generating a solution package You can use the SharePoint Designer to customize a site’s Master makes it possible to deploy your branding solution to any farm Page and to edit and integrate custom CSS files. However, when running WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007. It also makes it easy to create a working with a site collection based on standard WSS sites, the single source file for each Master Page and CSS file that can be reSharePoint Designer doesn’t provide a way to synchronize all the used across multiple site collections or across farms. Furthermore, sites within a site collection to use the same version of a customized Master Page. This can possibly lead to scenarios where you Send your questions and comments for Ted to mmoffice@microsoft.com. are forced to copy and paste your Master Page edits across mulCode download available at msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911. tiple Master Page files. July 2008 43 http://msdn.microsoft.com/magazine/cc135911

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - July 2008

MSDN Magazine - July 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Flex Your Data Data Points Advanced Basics Office Space Cutting Edge Data Services ADO.NET Data and WPF Transactions WCF P2P Test Run Security Briefs Foundations .NET Matters {End Bracket}

MSDN Magazine - July 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.