Changing master page for Sharepoint 2007

by heidi in Blog, Technical Tags: , , on October 31, 2007

I’ve had the honor and priveledge of working with Sharepoint 2007 over the last few weeks. Whether this sentence is complete irony or not, I’ll leave in the middle for now :) .

Applying our company’s logo and design to the overall layout of the site turned out to be not as easy as I thought it would be.
Of course, the most basic part was making a new masterpage with Sharepoint Designer 2007. This I did by making a copy of the default.master and adapt it to my own liking. I created a new css style for it so everything would stay a bit clean. This worked great for the public site parts. Our logo was shining all over the place … except … not “all” over the place …

The Sharepoint administration pages don’t seem to like to blend in very much. Turns out that these pages use a different master page: application.master. Whenever you google it everyone seems to scream about how dangerous it is to alter this page and you really shouldn’t mess with it. So you can imagine I wasn’t really jumping on the idea.
So I tried to find workarounds. The homepage administration pages seemed to use the same core.css file as the user pages, so I copy/pasted the css styles in my custom made css into the core.css at the bottom. So this fixed that problem.
But other administration pages seemed to use a totally different core.css file, one located at “…Program filesMicrosoft SharedWeb Server Extensions12templatelayouts1033styles”. So I did the same for that file.

Et voila … my site looks like it should w/o modifying the application.master page itself.Â
Some things you should hold into account:

  • make sure your image paths are correct
  • my master page didn’t differ that much from an original one. The parts I didn’t want visible I just put the position on absolute and the left tag on -10000px so it wouldn’t show up on my screen. On my own master page I could just delete these parts, but this is another way not to show them w/o editing the master page. This of course is only possible if the application.master page isn’t that different from the one you want to accomplish.
  • make sure you check in, publish and approve the master page you created, otherwise other people won’t be able to see it

Some useful links:

Good luck I’d say!