One of the things that customers appear to want, and will like about SharePoint is the ability to ‘brand’ or ‘skin’ it. For some reason, it’s something that people always get hung up on – what it looks like, not how it works – and I don’t expect we will have many projects that don’t have the question of branding/skinning/customisation. But what does this mean, how does it work, and what are the limitations? Continue reading
Themes in SharePoint are tough. I think this quote describes it nicely:
If you have attempted to override the styles on an out of the box SharePoint site, you know that it isn’t a very easy thing to do. The core.css file that contains the basic rules has 979 different style rules.
The core.css file uses a palette of 132 colors and 143 images.
The default page of a newly provisioned team site uses only 61 of those rules.
So, unless you have branded a lot of SharePoint sites and are intimately familiar with core.css and the default master pages and page layouts, just figuring out where to start modifying can be a daunting task.
So Doug has built SharePoint Skinner to make that easier. I’ve not tried it (yet) but I like his thinking…
So, Joel Oleson has blogged a bit about master pages and themes in MOSS. This is an area I think that the SharePoint team have the right idea, but execution is a little short.
My problems are that we have master pages – which is great. And we’ve got seperate master pages for standard pages, and administration pages. Okay, I’m happy with that. However, there is a mechanism for changing the master page for normal pages – but nothing for administration pages. ‘Cos nobody will ever look at them, right?
Then there is the question of master pages and themes. I really like some of the themes that come OOB, much more so than the default ‘blue’ (I like ‘Simple’). But they can only be applied on a site by site basis; there is no inheritance mechanism. And if you use a master page, it’ll probably override the theme anyway. So why have themes? Why not just use master pages?
Bit of a shocker – no inheritance of themes through a site hierarchy in WSS3. There is of Master Pages, but not of themes.
Given that you can do all of what you do with Master Pages it does make me wonder – what are Themes for?
Updated: Heather Solomon has looked at it, and her suggestion is to just put your styles in the Master page.
Updated again: Or just use the Alternate CSS URL for your site.