Trinkit, Thinking Web Solutions

Just released - a FREE Master Page for SharePoint Foundation 2010!

Download now from SharePointMasterPages.com »

We created this Master Page to help  designers / developers get a head start on integration projects, or for anyone wanting a clean, simple look and feel for their SharePoint Foundation 2010 installation.

Layout: Floating width 90%
Supported Browsers: Firefox, IE 7+
Integration: Collaboration Sites, Meeting Sites, Calendar, Search

Fresh off the press: 3 new Master Pages for SharePoint 2010! We have just launched SharePoint Master Pages (a sister site to SharePoint Themes).

SharePoint Master Pages is dedicated to branding SharePoint 2010, with masterpages built for both SharePoint Server and Foundation.

We are starting from small beginnings but have quite a few plans for the future... In the coming months we plan to roll out more Master Pages, Page Layouts, some SharePoint 2010 branding resources and freebies.

Our focus is on creating high quality branding resources for SharePoint at a price point that makes sense. Much of what can currently be found for sale are either poorly designed or lack the thourough integration of items such as the calendar, wiki, and my sites. We are hoping to fill this gap and solve a few of your SharePoint branding headaches.

So check the site out, buy a Master Page and check back later for some more quality stock!

Today we are doing a soft launch of our new store for SharePoint Themes.



Creating SharePoint themes is fairly complicated unless you have a pretty deep understanding of the many thousands of core SharePoint CSS classes. I commonly see quotes of over $5000 for one theme!

We are hoping to fill a market gap at a better price point, and solve a few of your SharePoint branding headaches.

Sometimes when updating a custom theme it can be really difficult to get your changes to take effect.

Normally the process to update a theme would be something like:

1. Copy new theme files to theme directory
2. Change selected theme to any other theme in site settings
3. Perform an IISRESET
4. Re-apply theme in site settings

However, sometimes no matter how hard you try it just won't update. In fact even if you manually update the cached theme css file in SharePoint Designer (in the _themes dir) it just reverts back to the previous version.

Turns out there is an extra step after copying your theme files in. You need to update the version settings in the theme.INF file. If I was changing this for the SIMPLE theme I would find the file to edit in the following directory:

And the values that need to be updated are highlighted below:

I normally just increment the numbers each time as with any versioning.

Follow the rest of the steps and you should have no trouble.

Here are a couple of related resources:

• How to create a custom theme
• 10 New themes released by Microsoft
• SharePoint Branding Tool

One of my biggest gripes with SharePoint is the difficulty in branding application or layout pages. These are the pages that no matter how much you tweak your master page, remain blue.

EXAMPLE:

here is my nice branded site

I want to upload a document, so i click upload document and get thrown back to this ugly page:

ouch!

I discussed one possible option for the user profile pages in an article series: How to customize the user information page (part 3)

But that is a lot of work if you are going to do it for a large number of pages - it may be plausible if there are half a dozen but in a collaboration portal scenario there are dozens of these pages.

So what are the options currently available....

Customize the files in the Layouts folder

This is actually the recommended approach by MSFT. Its very simple - take a backup and then modify away.

The obvious disadvanatge is when you are hosting more than one site on the same server - the changes affect all sites in your farm. Oh and any service pack/hotifx could overwrite any of your chnages.

Create a custom Layouts folder

This is a little better than the last method. You take a copy of the layouts directory and update IIS to point to the copy. Now all site collections in a single web app will share any modifications which is pretty acceptable. Your files can still be overwritten and you may get some strange behaviour for anything hardcoded to the layouts dir.

Check this Knowledge byte article for more info on these 2 methods.

SuperBranding

So this definately comes closest to an acceptable solution. Its a CodePlex project that has been put together by the legendary Ted Pattison. The way it works is by running an HTTP Module that intercepts page requestsa and overrides the preinit method to attach a custom mater page. Now we have full flexibilty and MSFT won't overwrite our customizations.

The upload page with superbranding:

That is a million times better!!!