Why I don't like SharePoint: Part II
Let me start this one off by (once again) saying that I do not “hate” SharePoint as a product. What I don’t like about it is certain choices the SP-developers made to facilitate other developers in creating a custom SharePoint site. This article is going to be about customizing the SharePoint interface to suit your own wishes.
Part II: GUI customisation
I’ve worked on a project that had a fully standardized MOSS installation that was going to use the collaboration portal with subsites. Seeing as how this would serve as an intranet the standard SharePoint GUI wasn’t good enough. The GUI would have to be adjusted to fit the company’s design and style. This design included webparts and system pages and I have to say that it really was a bitch to pull off.
SharePoint works with masterpages and themes. Seeing as how a theme wouldn’t suffice to pull off what we wanted we decided to go with a custom masterpage. We had a custom masterpage lying around from another project so we decided to take that and change all the tables and divs to suit our own layout. After adding the needed standard controls step by step and positioning these as needed, it was time to start styling. And that’s where the misery began.
In the end I ended up with multiple custom CSS files, overriding tons of standard SharePoint styles to eventually get the design we wanted. But then we found out that the system pages stayed the same. Which was kind of expected seeing as how SharePoint allows you to define both a normal and a system masterpage. So we made a copy of our normal masterpage and edited that to change some things and used that. Lo and behold, it works! At least, untill you start browsing the system pages and notice only half of them changed. Apparently there was yet another master for application pages, which are something different from system pages. SharePoint does NOT provide an out of the box option to change this masterpage so all you can do is edit the existing one, which isn’t the nicest solution in my opinion. In the end, the entire process of implementing the layout as we wanted it took over a month.
Steven is een afgestudeerd Software Engineer en heeft een baan als .NET ontwikkelaar. Fan van wielrennen, doet zelf aan mountainbiken, speelt wanneer hij zin heeft op zijn gitaar en Xbox 360. Probeert met enige regelmaat te bloggen over vanalles en nog niets.
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3 reacties op “Why I don't like SharePoint: Part II”
Ik heb iets te zeggen!
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Reclame..
I’ve seen the result…looked very good so it was worth it
Heh, I see you’ve already toned down your title from ‘hate’ to ‘don’t like’. Because I haven’t worked on the style part of the project you speak of, I can’t really say that I share your frustration on this particular subject. I would personally say that styling anything ‘in retrospect’ is a frustrating experience.
If you’re building something from the ground up with a certain design in mind you can focus completely on getting things to look exactly how you want them, but if you’re working with something that already exists (like sharepoint) which you’ll have to style to your liking, you’re almost always going to run into built-in things that conflict with your design choices.
Well I figured out that I do not hate it with all my guts, I just can’t stand working with it