Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Part 2: Site & System Pages

re: Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Part 2: Site & System Pages

inasolutions — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:54:26 GMT

Hey where is the code? It would be easier to follow this blog if I could see the finished project. Thanks!

re: Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Part 2: Site & System Pages

bgeoffro — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:52:07 GMT

Sounds like you've got the concepts down.

Only addendum to my previous comment is based on the new information you provided that you want to apply these hidden customizations to multiple site collections (though not necessarily all SCs created from a given site template). This still rules out feature stapling as a good idea, but you might iwant nstall a web-scoped feature w/o stapling and activate it on the specific site collections to which it applies. That would save the considerable duplication of effort incurred by performing the same SPD customizations over and over...

re: Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Part 2: Site & System Pages

vchan — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:52:17 GMT

Thanks for clarifying the use of a feature stapler. One of the items we were trying to figure out was if a feature stapler can be used for a specific site collection, but it appears that it is not meant to be used that way. The use of a stapler allows for applying feature(s) to a specified scope (farm, web application, site, web) based on a site definition.

Definitely agree on using SP Designer to apply a new master page is much easier than developing a feature for it. We were looking into feature stapling for other reasons in addition to applying a master page like applying a theme, and be able to apply updates to those themes/master pages seamlessly with the least effort to many site collections within a single web application (it looks like your BrandingUpdate program would be very helpful in this regard). The issue we came accross was to determine how to apply a feature stapler to site collection ABC using site def N, where there was another site collection XYZ also using site def N. It looks like there's no way for a feature stapler to tell the difference between the two since they are using the same site defintion. A custom site definition would need to be created that only site collection ABC uses, and the stapler associates with the custom site definition.

Many thanks for all your help. This has pointed us in the right direction. Thanks again! :)

re: Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Part 2: Site & System Pages

bgeoffro — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:57:12 GMT

Re: vchan's issues:

Sounds like you're stumbling on a couple of minor implementation issues and one big conceptual issue.

Implementation issues:

1. PublishLayouts - Set Hidden="TRUE" to prevent users from being able to activate/deactivate the feature manually. This is in the <Feature/> element - see the feature.xml for GenericBrandingStaplee above for an example.

2. CustomBranding - This doesn't need to be a distinct feature that you install in the 12 hive. This should be a feature receiver that you install in the GAC and register as a feature receiver assembly for PublishLayouts. In this way, CustomBranding would function similarly to MySiteCreate.cs above. You might even be able to reuse the MySiteCreate.cs feature receiver and the element.xml & feature.xml structures for GenericBrandingStaplee after ripping out the snippets that update the theme.

Conceptual issue:

Keep in mind that by implementing Web application-scoped feature stapling for a Web-scoped feature, you're APPLYING THE FEATURE TO *ALL* NEW WEBS INSTANTIATED FROM THE SITE TEMPLATES SPECIFIED IN THE FEATURE STAPLER.

So in your case, the intent captured by your feature stapler is, "apply this feature to all Team Sites on the Web applications where this feature stapler is activated". This seems to conflict with your objective of applying branding to a single site collection. If you just need to install and associate a new master page with a single site collection (or a handful of them), use SharePoint Designer. It's much faster and doesn't incur the labor costs of feature development and deployment.

re: Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Part 2: Site & System Pages

vchan — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:27:04 GMT

Brett,

Great posts on Feature Stapling! I was able to activate the branding features for a specific site collection, but it seems that the features are available (visible through Site Settings) to other web apps and their respective site collections as well.

The following features I am trying to implement:

PublishLayouts (staplee) - Scope: Site. Adds custom master page to file system & uploads to master pages gallery

CustomBranding (staplee) - Scope: Site. Applies custom master page to site collection

CustomBrandingStaple (stapler) - Scope: WebApplication. Associates the above features (GUIDs) to a Team Site Def (STS#0) and to a specified Web Application.

And installed & activated in this order using stsadm:

CustomBrandingStaple feature to a specific web app

PublishLayouts feature to a specific site collection w/in the above web app

CustomBranding feature to a specific site collection w/in the above web app

We also tested with swapping step #1 to the end, but no luck.

Would you have any insight as to what the issue may be or any suggestions to try?

High-Level-Anpassung von SharePoint

Mirrored Blogs — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:11:36 GMT

Eine sehr ausführliche Best-Practice Anleitung zum Theme SharePoint Anpassung mit vielen Hintergrundinformationen

High-Level-Anpassung von SharePoint

SharePoint, SharePoint and stuff — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:27:39 GMT

Ein sehr ausführliche Best-Practice Anleitung zum Theme SharePoint Anpassung mit vielen Hintergrundinformation

Branding a MOSS Corporate Intranet Portal, Introduction

Brett's SharePoint Blog — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 23:12:25 GMT

We’re finally starting to tie a little bow around the branding effort for my customer’s MOSS intranet

SharePoint customization guide - Brett Geoffroy

Suman Chakrabarti - ASP.NET Geek — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:14:55 GMT

If you're into MOSS customizations, check out Brett Geoffroy's MSDN blog. He's done a sweet job organizing