Branding in SharePoint Technologies (PART 2)
In this Part 2 blog I will focus more on Master Pages and will leave the css and themes out of scope of this blog 4 part blog series on branding. To start of let us understand what is a master page all about? Though most of us are aware of this, just to ensure everybody understands the same...
Master page is the portion of the page which will retain the common portion of the site/application like the header, footer, navigation, etc. Master Pages in SharePoint can reside on both the File System as well the SharePoint database. A page on file system is referred to as ghosted page and the one in database is referred to as un-ghosted page. Master Page along with the content page together forms the published page which will be finally rendered in the browser.
There are 2 types of Master Pages
· Site Master Pages· Application Master Pages
The classification of the Master pages into the two types is based on portion of the website the master page applies to as discussed in the table below.
| Site Master Pages | Application Master Pages |
| Purpose | Applied to the user facing pages | Applied to pages other than the user facing pages |
| E.g. | Master page applied to Default.aspx like Blue band, default based on the site template chosen | Master page applied to Site Actions, View all Site content, Workflow, Search page |
| Location | Master Page Gallery (Library) | On the file System in Layouts Folder (virtual directory name is called _layouts) |
| Is it generic | Specific for a site collection in a Web Application | Common across all the Web Applications/ Site Collections |
| Can they be modified | They can be modified within SharePoint Designer and once modified they will be stored in the Application specific SharePoint database | They can be changed but will reside in the file system only |
Now that we understand what is a master page and it types, next we need to understand what are the typical challenges that exists in branding wrt Master Pages.
The requirements of the Web Applications vary from organization to organization or rather even from department to department. The Web application being developed might be a onetime activity or may be a couple of Web Applications might get added in the future. There might be scenarios where there will be only one Web Application but the number of site collections will keep increasing, and can run into hundreds of them. Architects need to ensure that the required branding is applied on the site collections/Web Applications, and at the same time be changed in a controlled fashion if required. If changes need to be done for the Site Master Pages, how does one control them? What is the governance model to be put in place for all of these pages are some of the key challenges an architect will have to address. The subsequent parts of this blog will explain the options that are possible along with the pros and cons of the approaches so that depending on the situation the architect can take an appropriate decision ... Happy reading
