Well, here we are! After delving into dark arts where everybody but metrosexual web designers fear to tread (HTML and CSS), we then delved into the areas that metrosexual web designers truly fear to tread (packaging, deployment and even some c# code!). Finally, we get to the area where everybody is interested until it happens to get in their way! (Ooh, I am a cynical old sod tonight).

That is Governance!

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 7 -The ‘governance’ of it all..”

There has been a bit of a gap in this series between part 5 and 6 – and fortunately for the both of us, I think this is the penultimate post in my series on SharePoint branding. While it has been an interesting exercise for me, I must confess each successive article is getting harder to write as my interest is shifting 🙂  So many sub-disciplines within MOSS – I think I might delve into WCM soon :-).

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 6 – A "solution" to all issues?”

So, here we are at the fifth article in my series on SharePoint branding. By now, we have left all the master page stuff way behind, and we have created a custom feature to install our branding to a server.

To recap for those of you hitting this page first, I suggest you go back and read this series in order.

• Part 1 dealt with the publishing feature, and some general masterpage/CSS concepts and some quirks (core.css and application.master) that have to be worked around.
  
• Part 2 delved into the methods to work around the application.master and core.css issue
  
• Part 3 delved further into the methods to work around the application.master and core.css issue and the option that solved a specific problem for me
  
• Part 4 then changed tack and introduced how to package up your clever branding
  

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 5 – Feature Improvements and Bugs”

Welcome to the fourth article in my series on SharePoint branding. Sorry for the time it’s taken to get this one out, but a certain game called “The Legend of Zelda:  Hourglass Phantom” on NDS got in the way. I finished it yesterday and only had to cheat via google once :-). Anyway it’s out of my system now so I can get back to this.

After 3 epic articles on all that painful CSS and master page stuff (part one, two and three), we now focus on what you have to do to get your branding masterpiece deployed to the SharePoint farm the clever way. In this next set of articles, we will look at where things should go, and then how to get it there the right way.

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding Part 4 – Packaging up your masterpiece into a Feature”

Welcome to the third article (or is it a manifesto?) in my series on SharePoint branding. In this article, we continue examining methods to incorporate CSS files into master pages for clever branding. In my first article of this topic, I discussed what I think is the main issue with SharePoint branding – APPLICATION.MASTER and CORE.CSS. The previous article to this one, examined 5 methods to deal with the trial and tribulations of APPLICATION.MASTER and CORE.CSS behavior. So, to recap where we got to, let’s re-examine the original scenario and then look at the summary of the 5 different several methods with their relative merits and issues.

The Scenario

Like many organizations, my client had an existing corporate branding standard that was used in a non SharePoint environment and naturally enough, they wanted their SharePoint site to look like this branding. This was for a fully featured intranet/extranet that utilized most of the MOSS2007 features such as

• Document collaboration
• Infopath Forms Services
• Workflow
• Enterprise Search
• Excel services
• Business Data Catalog
• Custom web parts
• Event Handlers

It was *not* a public site at all.

Initial investigation soon concluded that we would need a custom master page. DEFAULT.MASTER didn’t quite have the design flexibility that was required. In fact the branding requirements were actually closer to some of the built in master pages such as BLUEGLASS.MASTER, since this was for intranet purposes, particularly collaborative document management, those master pages are unsuitable.

Continue reading “SharePoint Branding – How CSS works with master pages – Part 3”