Leave Default Master Pages In Peace

SharePoint 2010 comes with three out-of-box Master Pages  – v4.master (the default SP2010 design), default.master (the old MOSS2007 look) and minimal.master (used in SP2010 Search Center). In this tutorial we will create a new masterpage using the v4.master as a template and then connect the newly created custom Master Page to our site. It is a good idea to leave the default Master Pages untouched (at least for the examples in this post).

First we need to clone the v4.master file. Open SharePoint Designer 2010, and from the Sites tab select the Open Site icon and enter your site URL.

SharePoint Designer 2010 – Open Site window

The site root will be opened in SharePoint Designer 2010. Now select Master Pages from the left menu, click on the v4.master file and press CTRL+C and CTRL+V to create a
copy of the .master file.

SharePoint Designer 2010 with copy of the v4.master file

Now name your master page – click on the Rename icon in the ribbon and enter your custom name (for example myCustom.master).

Now using the newly created master page we are now ready to make the modifications. Users of your SharePoint site will not notice that we are changing anything, and if you will break something – you will break custom master page, not the one users are seeing.

Create a Custom CSS to Add Branding

Next we need a CSS file which overrides the default core4.css style definitions. To see some changes to our
customizations, we will include the fixed width style for our new master page.

Open SharePoint Designer 2010, select All files from the left menu and then enter the Style library.

To create a new css file, right click on the Style Library and select New > CSS from menu.

New CSS file menu in Style Library

Name this file myCustom.css, just to keep the naming schema consistent with our custom Master Page.

Right click the newly created .css file and select the Edit file in Advanced Mode option.

SharePoint Designer menu available on the CSS file

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• Using the SharePoint Designer.
• Designing the workflow in Microsoft Office Visio and importing into the SharePoint Designer.
• Writing programming code inside Microsoft Visual Studio.

Custom Workflows with the SharePoint Designer

In this article, we will explore the first approach. We will build a sample workflow that creates a new item in the Announcements list when someone uploads a document in a predefined document library. This will be accomplished without writing even a single line of programming code.

The first step is to create the document library where our custom workflow will run. To do this, select the “Site Actions” menu and then choose “New Document Library”.  The dialog for creating a new document library will appear (see Figure 1). Enter“Rules” for the library name and optionally provide a description. Press the “Create” button and our new library will be created.

Figure 1 Create new document library

Now we are ready to build the workflow for the newly created library. To do this, start SharePoint Designer 2010 and select “Open Site” from the menu. Then enter the URL address of your SharePoint site (Figure 2). In the this example the SharePoint server runs on the same machine where we are running the SharePoint Designer, so we will use “localhost”.

Figure 2 Opening a  site using SharePoint Designer

After a pause, the SharePoint Designer opens the site. To check what workflow templates are available, select the “Workflows” item from the “Site Objects” list (Figure 3). In this example only the default templates are available.

Now create a new workflow. We can choose from one of the following workflow types:

• List Workflow – this type of workflow can be attached only to SharePoint lists or libraries. This template comes in handy when the use-case is very specific and can be applied only to lists or libraries.
• Reusable Workflow – more flexible than the List Workflow and can be attached to a content type. Later this content type can be used in, for example, a list. In addition, workflows from this type can be imported into Visual Studio and enhanced with programming code.
• Site Workflow – this type of workflow operates on site level. For example, the List workflow operates over a SharePoint library. This workflow can operate over the overall site objects.

In this example, we will use the List Workflow. Click on the “List Workflow” and then select the “Rules” library. A new dialog will popup (Figure 4), where we provide the name of the workflow – “CreateAnnouncement”. Optionally you can provide description as well.

Figure 3 SharePoint Designer and Workflows

Figure 4 Create a new List Workflow

Now it is time to implement the steps in our workflow. Actually we will need to implement just a single step – create a new item in the announcements list.To do so, select the “Step 1” and start typing “cre”. Then press Enter (Figure 5).
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