Tag Archives: Branding

Programmatically apply a Default Theme in SharePoint

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve written a brand that is a combination of Theme and Master Page, and is designed to be activated by a feature receiver. When the feature is deactivated, it should restore the previous Master Page and Theme – but it wasn’t doing this for the default theme. Weird.

Well, here’s another good tip from Madalina you have to apply a theme of none, not Default.

web.ApplyTheme("none");

That’s the second tip of hers I’ve found on Google and used in the last 2 weeks. Maybe I should start watching that blog. Anyway, I guess that ‘none’ makes sense when you look in 12/TEMPLATES/LAYOUTS/1033/SPTHEMES.xml – the default theme has a TemplateID of ‘none’.

‘Course my next problem for my feature receiver is that Meeting Workspaces use master pages (MWSDefault.master) that are significantly different to other pages – thanks guys, that’s helpful…

Changing SharePoint Menu Colours

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I was looking at something a bit curious – I wanted to change the menus in SharePoint, specifically the colour down the left hand side of the menu:

As the menus are dynamic, I wasn’t able to interrogate them with the IE Dev toolbar to know what styles were being applied. I took a screenshot and tried looking for the colour of the bar in the CSS files. It wasn’t there.

Huh?

Well, I realised that I’d have to trawl through the CSS searching for a likely looking class. I tried Core.css and found the ms-MenuUI and ms-MenuUILarge classes (also defined in the in the Menu.css file, for some reason).

These use images for those bars! Ah! Changing them results in my new background image being used:

Sorted!

Rounded Corners are cool in SharePoint, apparently

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I’m not a designer; I neither wear cool enough glasses, a turtleneck, nor sport an iPhone. But I do have to build other peoples designs, and I’ve noticed something – every design I get handed has rounded corners all over it.

I do see their point – SharePoint is a bit, well, ‘Square’. “Boxy but good”.

So instead we have designs with corners, well, all over them. Here’s the one I’ve been working on:

Things to note there – Rounded corners on the tabs in the top nav, and a rounded corner (only one) on the web part title. How did I do this? Continue reading →

Remove a Separator Character from the Global Links

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I ain’t dead, just flat out busy. I’m working on a branding project at the moment, which I hope to write some more about. But here’s a tricky little problem that I was struggling with.

Our customer wanted to remove the ‘Help’ and ‘My sites’ links from the Global Links in the top right of the page (the Mysite link is going elsewhere on the page), so I removed these items from my new master page. I ended up with something like this:

I’ve highlighted the problem in yellow – a spurious trailing ‘|’ character which is being used as a seperator between links. I didn’t want this though! Looking at the code in my master page, though, showed that this link was being generated by a Delegate control:

Oookay. Not sure why the default value for this is coming from a delegate control, but there you go. Let’s have a look at the code for that delegate control:

Right, so the code is held in a control template -fair enough, let’s look in there:

There we go – a literal control. I have no idea what’s putting that separator character into the literal – and I don’t want to define my own delegate control to override the current delegate control.

So what to do? Well, simple answer – I copied the MyLinksMenuControl into my master page (but without any damn asp:Literal control). All this raises two questions though:

  1. Why are some of the Global links (though not all) rendered via Delegate controls?
  2. Who thought that rendering the control with a separator was a good idea?

All in all, it seems to be absurdly complex and highly effort-filled if you want to change anything here.

Setting the Master Page of a Team Site with a Feature

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Team sites don’t have the Publishing features of MOSS enabled by default, and for WSS systems, well, you don’t have them to enable. Consequently, if you deploy a master page as a feature, you’ll have a bit of fun setting it as the master page.

You can do this though SharePoint Designer, but it’s possible you don’t want your Site owners to have SharePoint Designer, or maybe you just don’t want the hassle of the second step when you provide the master page for a site. Instead, it is possible to set the Master Page through code, and to fire this using a Feature Receiver. This features shows just that – setting the master page through code. Note that to install it, you might well need to make some changes to install.bat. Continue reading →

Relative URLs in SharePoint Sites using $SPUrl

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So, I was really stuck with a Master Page that I’ve been building as a demo. This master page was for use on a site without the publishing features, such as a Team Site.

I wanted to provide a separate CSS file and an image for with this example. However, I hit a snag – how to get relative URLs to the CSS file and image that I was putting into the site?

For Publishing sites, this isn’t normally a problem – you put things such as the master page or images or CSS near the root, and then reference them from the root of the site collection. But from the subsite I was using, this proved hard.

Well, in the end I turned up this post from Ben Robb about using $SPUrl. It turns out that this works nicely for images, and for links to other content, such as CSS files:
<link id="css1" runat="server" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<% $SPUrl:~site/_catalogs/styles/mystyles.css%>" />
or
<img id="img1" src="<% $SPUrl:~site/images/badger.png%>" />

Unfortunately, it relies on the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace, which means that this solution isn’t WSS friendly; certainly I couldn’t get it working. Or rather, maybe it isn’t – perhaps the Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing namespace is available in WSS3, even if the publishing features themselves aren’t. Does anybody know about that?

How do I get the File Extension in my Search Results?

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Following on from my previous post, I’ve been looking some more at the code that one of my colleagues has created for styling up some search results. In it he needs the file extension for the item resulting, and he does this by, um, assuming that it’s the last 3 letters of the items URL. Yes, I am not amused. For example, if you look at the results from my last post… Continue reading →

Styles in the Summary Links Web Part

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So, I’d been asked to look at building a links menus something like this:

A Fake Menu with Big Buttons

I thought that this was quite nice. I wondered if I could make something similar to this using the Summary Links web part – curiously, it’s something I’ve never really used, and I though I remembered seeing that it could show images too. So, I set up some examples… Continue reading →

Accessibility in MOSS…

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Recently I had a meeting with HiSoftware about the Accessibility Kit for SharePoint that they’ve made (and is available on CodePlex), and it was quite interesting. Making a SharePoint system accessible requires knowing how much of the system to make accessible, and to what level of accessibility. As with branding, doing the whole system would probably be prohibitively expensive. However, making certain areas (such as a WCM site) accessible is quite feasible.

Even if a SharePoint system is developed to be accessible, there is a governance issue in make sure that new content is also accessible. HiSoftware provide the Accessibility Kit (for free) to help develop an accessible site – though custom work will always be required. They also provide several commercial products to facilitate governance of new content and ensuring that it is accessible. I think that these will be useful sometimes, so it’s not a bad sales pitch. Continue reading →

Pimp my SharePoint Part II – Beyond Just Colours

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Previously I’ve written about branding in SharePoint and the technologies involved. However, there is more to branding than just the technologies used and the colours you want, which was what that post focussed on. Really, it’s more a question of style and content than just colour and pictures. This makes it all a good deal more complicated though, which emphasises the need for proper management of the work and for it to be treated as a proper project.

To recap on the technologies used in MOSS branding, briefly:

  • Master Pages – can change everything
  • Themes - can change the colour of elements and the background images.
  • Web Parts – can change the layouts of pages and some of the appearance.
  • Combination thereof.

The two main technologies discussed in branding are Master Pages and Themes, and a good description is:

[Themes are] Akin to painting a house new colors and changing the pictures on the walls. [Master Pages are] Akin to remodelling the whole house
Heather Solomon

Well, recent experience of branding and some interesting slides by Heather Solomon have driven home some other points. Note that these apply to MOSS but not WSS (which only has ‘basic’ pages). The ultra high level view of what I’ve learnt is:

  • Just saying ‘X days to do branding’ is not a good idea.
  • Branding encompasses more than I’d previously really thought about, both in a business and technology senses.
  • It’s more of a ‘Pick and Mix’ affair than ‘small, medium or large’
  • Specification and scope is vitally important.
  • Therefore, branding should be treated as a proper project in its own right, with requirements, specification, design and testing phases.

Continue reading →