So, I’m back on this topic of messing up… I mean making changes to SharePoint pages. As you read around the web you will fine that most folks (including Microsoft, and for that matter even SharePoint itself) would like you to use SharePoint Designer to make changes to your SharePoint pages. I don’t have any real reason not to like this idea. In fact, SharePoint Designer it quite familiar to me since I used FrontPage for lots of years. Generally speaking I would also jump onto that Bandwagon of folks that say… just use the Designer. There is, however, one caveat… gee were you expecting there not to be one?
The caveat with using SharePoint Designer is less about the tool itself and more about how SharePoint will not allow you to touch (at least not easily) certain parts of itself. Yes, believe it on not, there are ‘hidden’ places in SharePoint that are not directly exposed to the network through the normal means (what the hell do I mean by that?). Well in short, when you open your SharePoint site using the Designer, most of the folder structure is exposed for you to look at and make modifications to. Except of course the ‘hidden’ stuff… and those parts that SharePoint would prefer you to modify using the built in ‘Edit Page’ functionally (more on that later).
Now, why am I going on about this? Well it gets back to some general modifications I wanted to do to my site. Specifically, I wanted to remove from the very top right global links to ‘My Site’… I felt these links were unnecessary and in fact these links pointed to the server on my intranet (which when one accesses from the Internet…they of course fail). So the task was to remove all of this from every page. At first it seemed a simple matter, after all those top links are in the Default Master page… change the master page and it changes on every page within my SharePoint… yeah! Right! Yeah! No it doesn’t!
As it turns out, there are more than one Master page and more than one location for these special pages!! Yeah!
So, you start off with editing your SharePoint site with SharePoint Designer and you can locate what is generally called the Default Master page for you site. Look under _catalog off the main sited. In there you will see a masterpage (gallery folder). Now, within that folder you can find the magical Default.Master file. Yes, that is the one… at last! You found it.
If you don’t have versioning turned on your site…now is a good time to think about turning it on. If you mess up or modify this file in ways that cause your site to … well look strange, then you may want to be able to undo your mods.
Next entry… where’s the ‘other’ master pages and how can I screw with them?
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