I am lightly branding an extranet site. I’m making just two changes to the appearance – adding the word “Extranet” so it appears in the top center of the blue bar at the top of the page, and putting a coporate logo in place of the standard site icon (titlegraphic.gif) – and doing so in a way that site administrators can’t change it via the standard web pages.
As part of this, I want to add this branding to all the administrative pages too. This is particularly important as the system administrators also admin a similar looking intranet site, and so this branding provides an important visual reminder to let them know which environment they are working in.
The question arises: How many master pages are there by default and what pages use them?
There are 6 master pages in the _layouts (12\Template\Layouts) directory:
- Application.master
- Dialog.master
- Layouts.master
- Pickerdialog.master
- Simple.master
- Sspadmin.master
There is one master page in the _Admin (12\Template\Admin) directory. These pages are for Central Admin.
As far as I can tell, no _layouts pages use Layouts.master. Here’s a quick way to tell which _layouts or _admin pages use a master page. In this example, I show which _layouts pages use the application.master page.
- Open a command prompt
- CD to the Layouts directory (c:\program files\common files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\Template\Layouts – though I suspect most of you reading this blog have this memorized by now…)
-
Find /I “application.master” *.aspx | more
- This will list out all the apsx files and for those of them that use the application.master page, it will show the line where the page is used.
You can see from this screen shot that AccessDenied.aspx does NOT use application.master (it uses simple.master, though you can’t see that here) while ACLINV.aspx, AddContentSource.ASPX, and AddContentTypeToList.ASPX do use application.master.
From this, I’ve determined that I want to brand application.master, simple.master, and sspadmin.master, as well as admin.master.
This will change most of the admin pages, but there can still be a few master pages – stored in the DB rather than on the filesystem – that will have to be adjusted via SharePoint Designer. One of these the default.master for the Central Admin site. NOTE however, that you DO NOT EDIT THE MASTER PAGE FOR AN SSP ADMIN SITE. If you customize from the site definition the master page for an SSP Admin site, the site will break.
I repeat, DO NOT CUSTOMIZE THE MASTER PAGE FOR AN SSP ADMIN SITE. If you do, the default.aspx page for that site will display an error message:” The base type ‘Microsoft.Office.Server.Internal.UI.SharedServicesAdminDefaultPage’ is not allowed for this page. The type is not registered as safe.” You can undo your change by resetting to the site definition. I suppose you could add a SafeControl entry to mark the type as safe, but I haven’t tried doing that, and is it really worth the effort?
–Michael