Branding Overview

Today I am going to give a high level overview of branding SharePoint 2007.  First, I will give a short description of each of the core elements of a SharePoint brand, and then I will briefly outline how to create a consistent brand across a SharePoint website. 

Custom branding SharePoint is an undertaking that will require significant time and resources to plan, design, develop, and implement.  For our purposes, a basic/core SharePoint brand is composed of Master Pages, Layout Pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Item Styles, Themes, and Features.  Several factors including the website’s scope, best practices, amount of customization required, and maintainability should be considered when planning how best to design and implement a SharePoint brand.  Below is a brief explanation of each part of a SharePoint brand:

• The Master Page is a container

Recently I worked on a partner project that integrated a third party search engine with Sharepoint (MOSS) 2007.  The most interesting use case in the project was to construct a custom component to replace the search bar in the Sharepoint site page headers.  The component was to be designed to access the third party search engine, which had been configured to crawl the Sharepoint content store.

It's an interesting use case because, in general, Sharepoint is not designed to easily integrate components into the Master Pages that govern the header display.  Sharepoint readily accepts Webpart components into the content areas of the pages, but the Master pages are not Webpart enabled.  Also, there is already a default search bar incorporated into the Master Page header as a ContentPlaceHolder, and it doesn't go away easily.  The project was even more interesting because I used the Microsoft Ajax Toolkit in my custom component.  As you might

The goal of this article is to show you how to use pack:tag to optimize the performance of your JBoss Portal theme. I’ve used this approach on a production JBoss Portal 2.6 implementation and tested the approach out in version 2.7.