Branding of Sites in Windows SharePoint Services and MOSS 2007

Shawn Cicoria — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 02:49:20 GMT

I'm attending Ted Pattison's course on WSS 3.0 this week in Redmond and today we covered quite a bit around master pages, css, and web parts.

From a prior class, Ted was shown an example or intercepting the request using plain a old ASP.NET Module to rewrite the master page directive giving a site the ability to dynamically apply branding based upon configuration across a Site and Site Collection.

Here's the link to the CodePlex site that includes the solution.

SuperBranding - Home

It's great that WSS v3/MOSS 2007 builds upon ASP.NET 2.0 making the programming model quite a bit more consistent from prior releases. The configuration is still a beast and you're still in a "box" a bit, but clearly the hooks are there to do much of what you'll need to do to get customized sites created.

Many developers, architects, etc. still want to build out entirely on raw ASP.NET w/ out WSS or MOSS. In many cases it make sense (perhaps most). But you can't ignore the amount of plumbing and basic functionality that WSS brings to the table, albeit a daunting task to comprehend -- which is why I think most folks bypass it. There are arguments for the simplicity, but time to market is key too and when 90% of applications out there are "battleship gray" and just CRUD against business entities, it's hard to justify.

Information Worker

Branding of Sites in Windows SharePoint Services and MOSS 2007