_layout pages and masterpage

Hi All,

I'm a bit confused here. Is it true that modifying the application.master (which I don't want to do) is the only way to change the masterpage for the _layout pages in Sharepoint 2007

In fact changing all the files themselves is not an option either because it's not supported I was told.

So how's the correct procedure to change the _layout pages from your sitecollection

Fred

SharePoint Products and Technologies4

Hello Fred,

as i know this is the only option to set application wide master settings. Does someone else know about other possibilities

Greetings, Marcel

Hi All,

Little update ... I found an interesting blogpost on this subject:

http://www.sharepointblogs.com/dwise/archive/2007/01/08/SingleMasterPage.aspx

Basically it's writing a small http module that checks for application.master when a page loads and when found it replaces it with your own masterpage.

I don't know if this is fully supported, but it works fine for me ... Just make sure you have a clean masterpage ... it threw me some errors on some pages at first because I missed some placeholders.

Fred

Yup, that's the only way I've seen it done (although I read about it elsewhere) and it works just fine for me.

yeah, that's it. i compiled the http handler and it works nice!

is there an option to do the same with a custom theme i would like to apply my theme on all sites. i think the problem there is, that the masterpages is a part of .net 2.0, but themes are a sharepoint related thing.

thx for your feedback!

Nope, but I'd like to know that too. It's on the 'to learn' list. Themes are a part of ASP.NET 2.0, though, so they're not SharePoint specific - it just doesn't seem to be easy to force inheritance of a theme. Will let you know if I find out.

i see. i have to figure it out in the next days, will post the solution here if i find a hack. if sharepoint wants to replace mscms there is a lot of work to do. by now theming needs a lot of experience. there are just a small amount of websites who use sharepoint as "pure" cms, and websites that are not looking like sharepoint standard layouts. ;-)

Hmm. I had a bit of a look around. Heather Solomon seems to be pretty hot at this sort of thing, and I found an interesting page:

http://www.heathersolomon.com/blog/archive/2006/10/27/sp07cssoptions.aspx

It sort of consolidated a thought I'd already had in my head. Given that master pages and themes do similar things (in some ways) one answer is to just not use themes. Put your styles in your master page, and force inheritance of that. That seems to be her suggestion.

hey andy, thx!

i've also seen this post, this would work... what about just to modify the default theme until now i couldn't find the default theme.. ghosted and unghosted.. do you know where to find it if i don't find another solution, i have to do it the way Heather Solomon mentioned. Thx to her..

today i implemented my customized css styles in the following unghosted masterpages:

application.master (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS)
default.master (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL)
customized.master (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\THEMES\YOURTHEMENAME)

and my customized styles are applied on every page, inclusive the settingspages and mysite!

thanks a lot to Heather!