Buta no Ie » master page

Branding SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Sites – Part 3 in a Series

Buta — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:04:48 +0000

In part two, we posted about how to register our custom style sheets in a way that we could still take advantage of the new SharePoint 2010 colour switching theming engine. In this post we’ll go through how to do this without having to modify the out-of-the-box master pages or having to use custom master pages for your sites.

Delegate Controls

As I mentioned at the end of part two, the way we’re going to get our CSS added to our sites and pages is through the use of a delegate control. For those of you who aren’t familiar with delegate controls, they are essentially placeholders for you to inject your own controls via a feature. Your feature can be scoped to either Web, Site, WebApplication or Farm. I’m going to keep the explanation on delegate controls short as there’s plenty of information out there about them:

AdditionalPageHead Delegate Control

The AdditionalPageHead Delegate

Delegate controls have a AllowMultipleControls property which when set to true, all controls keyed to that delegate are added to the page; when set to false, only the control registered with the lowest sequence value is added to the page.

All of the delegate controls in the OOTB master pages have AllowMultipleControls set to false, with the exception of one, AdditionalPageHead, which does allow multiple controls. And guess what? AdditionalPageHead is actually located in the page head, where you would normally add CSS elements! This is the perfect place for us to inject any CSS registration controls.

Putting it all together…

Let’s put together a simple solution using the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Tools which will:

deploy our CSS file in the Themable folder in the /Layouts/1033/Styles
deploy a user control into the ControlTemplates folder which uses the CSSRegistration control to register our CSS
install a feature which inserts our user control onto our pages via the AdditionalPageHead delegate

The CSS

Keeping it simple, all our CSS does is set the background color of the . We’ll use #FFF (white) as our default background color and also decorate the rule with one of the SharePoint 2010 compile time directives to whatever we might set the “Light1″ color value as through the Theme UI.

body {
/*[ReplaceColor(themeColor:"Light1")]*/
background-color: #fff;
}

The Delegate Control

Again, nice and simple, we’re going to use the CSSRegistration control to register our branding CSS after corev4.css:

<%@ Assembly Name="$SharePoint.Project.AssemblyFullName$" %>
<%@ Register Tagprefix="SharePoint" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

Element Manifest

And finally we’ll define our element manifest for our delegate feature:

You’ll most likely scope your delegate feature to either Web or Site for branding purposes. I tend to scope my feature at the site collection level to achieve a consistent brand across all the webs in the site collection. If there’s a requirement to have different branding for one or two specific sites, then we can always have a second feature which deploys those overrides at a web-level scope. If you have vastly different brands across webs in your site collection, then you may want to scope only at the web level so that your brands don’t conflict or end up with any style inheritance issues.

That’s it!

If all went well, we should see the link to our style sheet emitted after the link to corev4.css!

Our branding CSS being emitted in HTML

If all is not well, here’s the ZIP file containing the branding VS2010 solution for reference:
SingChan.SP2010.Branding.zip

Previously…

SharePoint 2010: Upgrading your Public Beta solutions to RC

Buta — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:42:38 +0000

A word to the wise, if you’re planning on upgrading your solutions developed on the public beta to the new SharePoint 2010 Release Candidate, double check your code!

This is especially true if you have custom master pages, page layouts, or site templates which are derived from the OOTB ones.

Here’s a simple screen grab of a diff between the Public Beta v4.master and the version in the RC:

v4.master differences

Notice one of the Site Actions menu items has been removed in the RC and permissions are slightly different in another. There are other small differences in the v4.master like some of the sprite co-ordinates have changed for the help and recycle bin icons which might leave you scratching your head as to why the wrong image is showing up.

The v4.master is just a short example. I found quite a few differences in the Blog site template and spent quite a bit of time doing diffs and merging my customizations back into the updated RC versions.

If you’re using TFS for your source control, I found it helpful to just copy and paste the contents of original version of whatever file you customized into your versioned control file and then doing a difference/merge between that and the last version checked-in.

SPC09: Master Pages

Buta — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 23:58:13 +0000

A quickie: no more application.master!

In Microsoft SharePoint Foundation, application pages can now inherit a customized site master page through the DynamicMasterPageFile attribute.

In addition, there are a few pages which have been designated as Safeguarded Application Pages. These are the application pages that have safeguards against a broken master page. If these pages encounter an error when loading the dynamic master page, a safe master page in the _layouts folder is loaded instead.

AccessDenied.aspx
MngSiteAdmin.aspx
People.aspx
RecycleBin.aspx
ReGhost.aspx
ReqAcc.aspx
Settings.aspx
UserDisp.aspx
ViewLsts.aspx

Check out the documentation on MSDN regarding master pages in SharePoint 2010.