Amar Galla’s Weblog

Recently I have been involved in many projects on branding and customizing SharePoint. Hence I decided that combining everything I have learnt from it would make a good topic for a series of posts. I find very less tutorials on how to effectively brand SharePoint. By effectively, I mean, giving the maximum amount of flexibility which not necessarily is the easiest thing to do.

Let’s try to see in how many ways can you brand sharepoint.

1. Style sheet branding. This is a quick and easy way to brand your SharePoint site, but all you can achieve with it, is change the color, text and html element styling etc. You are stuck with the page layout, webpart zones and available web parts in your page or template.


2. Themes. Similar to the above, but in reality I tend to stay away form them.


3. Templates. The most cumbersome but effective way to brand SharePoint. In my experience I have found this to be the only reliable way to effectively achieve all your branding needs ( coupled with style sheets ).


4. Onet.xml. This is the only way to customize a site definition. On the branding side it does not help much, except define an alternate header and css files. It is also used to pre-populate webpart zones with webparts on site creation.

I do not recommend any of our clients to use frontpage with SharePoint and hence tend to steer clear with anything that has to do with Frontpage. Will post more on my recommendations on how best to effectively brand your portal / site in coming articles.

While working with SharePoint templates, if you come across a javascript error, saying “removeAlerts is undefined”, then you have accidently knocked off <SPSWC:AlertsSecurityCheck runat=”server”></SPSWC:AlertsSecurityCheck> from the template page. Put that back in to make life easy

Edit: Somehow my code got lost when wordpress autoformatted this post when I migrated from DotNetJunkies. It is corrected now.

If you have a WSS site with SelfServiceSiteCreation turned on, or you are creating sites programatically using SelfServiceSiteCreation process, it does not create subsites under the root WSS site. Instead it creates top level sites under the Virtual Server under which your root site exists. If you want a list of all such top level sites existing under a WSS Virtual Server, you can use the command line stsadm.exe -o enumsites -url http://WssSiteUrl

But… what if you want to get this list programatically. You cannot get this info from enumerating the subsites or subwebs of the root WSS site. In order to get it, you will need the help of the SPGlobalAdmin class. This piece of code might come handy. The code is in VB, but can easily be ported to C#

End Sub

For SPS it will not list the sites under the Site Directory ( which can be obtained using the Topology Manager ). Instead it will list the MySites created on the portal.

Just wanted to make a quick blog post. Will try to post a detailed walkthru later on. I just successfully extended some of the pages from the _layouots directory by overriding some of the default methods of the SharePoint dll’s. Had never done this before and so was not sure if it can be done or not. But now I can write confirmed that it can be done. I managed to add additional functionality to some of the aspx pages from the _layouts directory while retaining the existing functionality and also altering the way the existing functionality worked. Both these ways are possible. As long as the assembly is not obfuscated, ( which most of the application page assemblies are not ), then it’s easy to achieve this.

My latest SharePoint article is up on www.asptoday.com . It focusses on Introducing Sharepoint to .NET developers. However, non developers will also find the article informative. So if you want to know what SharePoint is and what features good or bad exist, then head over to http://www.asptoday.com/Content.aspx?id=2372 .

As always, comments are always welcome. Any suggestions and constructive criticism is welcome