Since I have recently been involved in implementing SharePoint I have had to try and figure out how it works and how to customize it. The first thing that I have tried to focus on is how to properly brand the look and feel of the interface so that it doesn't look like it came straight from Microsoft. If we are to use it as our Intranet website, then it definitely needs to look completely different.
It has been incredibly difficult to find out how to properly brand SharePoint. I have done a lot of searching and found very little. Easpecially little in the way of pre-built custom master pages. These are almost non-existent. I have found a couple of them, but the ones that I have found have not been good. So it is up to us to come up with a new master page to use with SharePoint.
The creation of the master pages was also a mystery for quite some time, at least in the traditional ASP.NET way of doing things. There are countless articles on how to develop a simple master page using SharePoint Designer. I don't want to use SharePoint Designer though mainly because it is a horribly lacking program from a developers standpoint, and it also doesn't allow code behind. So for me, Visual Studio is always the way to go.
Although they built in Sharepoint features and projects to the new Visual Studio 2010, they left out quite a bit, native Master Page development being one of them. With some searching, I was able to find this post on msdn: Deploying Branding Solutions for SharePoint 2010 Sites. It goes through, step-by-step, how to make a new Master Page and supporting images and css files in a Visual Studio SharePoint solution project, even keeping it contained in a sandbox solution. It doesn't say how to create a code-behind for a master page but basically all you need to do is add a .cs or .vb file and name it the same way you did your master page just adding the .cs or .vb. For example, my master page is named Intranet.master, my code-behind would be named, Intranet.master.cs or Intranet.master.vb. Then you'll need to add a few using/Imports statements to the top of the code to make it work effectively.
There are also a couple other resources that I have found to be extremely helpful so far. They also help to realize what is possible with branding in sharepoint and possible best practices to use as well.
I'm sure there are more resources out there. These are the ones that I have found to be most useful and contain a lot of information about Branding.
Hope this helps,
Kevin
Posted:
3/4/2011 9:54:43 AM by
Kevin Paxton | with
0 comments