This is my first post in a blog…..anywhere.
I decided to do this as I wanted to share my experiences of working with and developing on the SharePoint 2007 platform.
I have been a web developer for nearly 10 years and a programmer for almost 20 years. I enjoy the challenge. I've used SharePoint for a long time but never at a programming level – just as a user.
I've been given the task of customising SharePoint and implementing our department brand. My SharePoint Designer 2007 course isn't until the end of October so things are a bit confusing at the moment!
I understand master and content pages through ASP.NET 2.0 but to actually get all this to work after making some changes is a real challenge!
I have tried to find a decent step by step guide to customising MOSS on the internet but have had no luck. The stuff I have found is too high level and assumes you know exactly what you are doing.
So, does anyone know of a step by step guide to creating a new master page and applying it to a site?
Next stop was to find out where the templates are that create each type of page, i.e. where is the master wiki page? I need to customise it so that it has extra stuff on it. If I create a custom master page and apply it it then appears everywhere! Very confusing….
I have two colleagues in a similar position – we know a bit, but not enough. We have a development environment that we use but cannot have admin rights to the physical server – so how do we see the images SharePoint uses? Without admin rights we can't see the other master forms. Not easy to develop like that.
How did we get around it? Well, I have built a MOSS system on Virtual PC 2007. It's running on a laptop with 1gb memory and a 30gb hard drive. Windows 2003 Server R2, SQL 2005, Office 2007, MOSS and Visual Studio 2005 all running in 512mb RAM! Yes, I was surprised too. I link to it from another machine and although it's not lightening fast, it works.
I have never installed a server operating system before so was quite pleased when it all started working.
I did find a couple of good resources on the net while looking for help. Heather Solomon's site gave me the initial grounding to have a go. The SharePoint Developers Blog was also useful and interesting. Another one was SharePoint Skinner, a handy application that let's you create themes.
I will over the course of time write my own user guide to all this (I'm pretty good at user guides) I just need to learn how to do it.
I'd also be interested in hearing how other people have implemented MOSS. Did staff take to it with open arms? Is it used heavily? How did you make it engaging so that people wanted to use it?
And finally….
I've created custom.master and applied it to a wiki page (one that already existed). It makes more sense now but I still need to know how to get new wiki pages to use it.
My next challenge is to totally change the layout of the page and put in new graphics.
I'll let you know how I get on….
petermorath