SharePoint Branding – How CSS works with master pages – Part 2
Jeez if I had realised how long it would take to write these damn articles, I probably wouldn’t have started! In my first article of this topic, I discussed the theory behind master pages, the publishing feature, and what I think is the main issue with SharePoint branding – APPLICATION.MASTER and CORE.CSS. In this article I will now list a branding scenario that I had to deal with, and the various options you can use to deal with the challenges of APPLICATION.MASTER and CORE.CSS
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. (I will explain why soon).
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