Well this looks like quite a challenge up front and I’ve yet to find a way of creating one master page that all new sites use (without editing the installation wide 12 hive files). Somehow need to get it to appear in the list of site templates or themes, or at least be in the list of master pages to select from from within SharePoint.
First step is to connect to your SharePoint site in ShrePoint designer. Once connected navigate to the ‘masterpages’ folder. There should be a default.master in there. My hunch is to leave that well and truely alone as a fallback if things go wrong!
So create a new file in there called anythingyouwant.master
Then depending on how you want to tackle this either copy the contents of default.master into your new file and hack away, or get a minimal masterpage
Note the minimal masterpage is just that and has no layout information.
Once you have saved the file, right click on the files icon and select the option of default master page.
Note don’t delete any of the content place holders from the masterpage, it will catch you out at some point!
My approach to using a different stylesheet is to make a copy of core.css and rename it. then link to this stylesheet in the masterpage. Again this leaves the original files intact.
Changing the master page manually via SharePoint designer every time a
new site is creating doesn’t sound fun. Nor does ending up with
multiple copies of the customised masterpages.
Next steps how to organise this properly so we have one copy of the masterpage and one copy of the css for a site collection rather than having to do this for each site we create…… anyone??
