R – Best practice for redesigning a SharePoint site

sharepointsharepoint-2007sharepoint-designer

Basically need to use SharePoint (because we promote MS yay!) as a content management system for an internet facing site.

How do I get rid of the default SharePoint look and feel and make it look like however I want it to?

I know the process involves creating a new masterpage with SharePoint Designer. However I prefer to code webpages rather than use a visual editor. Is this possible? Do I need knowledge of .NET?

Just check out ferrari.com for a very well made redesign of a SharePoint site.

Best Answer

Heather Solomon's Branding SharePoint series would be a good place to start. There's a lot you can do just with CSS, JS and HTML, but the most complete solutions (like Ferrari) require some pretty extensive customization with .NET and other SharePoint development techniques (features and delegate controls, in particular).

Your branding effort will be a lot easier if you only need to heavily brand the public-facing "publishing pages", from which you can remove most of the SharePoint-specific elements that make branding difficult.

Also, SharePoint Designer has a source view if you don't like the visual editor.

Related Solutions

SharePoint – How to customize NewForm.aspx in custom feature

Re Masterpage: I think you want '~masterurl/gcmaster.master'. no "/" between the "~" and "master".

Re NewForm: You can create your own code-behind page for NewForm.aspx, change the Inherits attribute to your own class. I think I would start by having my custom code behind inherit from SharePoint.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebPartPage, and go from there.

R – Sharepoint Workflow Fails When First Run But Succeeds When Run Manually

I'm guessing this has to do with the workflow being fired asynchronously from the commit operation that sets the fields values. Can you try and fetch the item explictly from the list instead of using the Item from the workflow properties. something like the following:

SPListItem l_item = 
      workflowProperties.Item.List.Items.GetItemById(
                 workflowProperties.Item.Id
      );

i'm not certain, but it may be worth a try.

The other thing to keep in mind is the SPContext.Current object will be null if being called from an EventReceiver, but will be valid if called manually. It doesn't sound like this is the issue, but its something to be aware of nonetheless.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

SharePoint – How to customize NewForm.aspx in custom feature

R – Sharepoint Workflow Fails When First Run But Succeeds When Run Manually

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