Thinking out aloud - Dave Hunter's SharePoint Blog

Before Christmas I wrote an article about consistent branding.  This used the AlternateCssUrl property of a SPWeb.  You can also set this using the administration pages or via code using a SPFeatureReceiver.

 

 

Using this technique applies branding to SharePoint front end and back end pages, but didn't affect SharePoint's error page.  The error page uses Simple.master.  Simple.master can be located in C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS\.

 

After some investigation I noticed the Alternate Property of the CssLink control.  If this is set to true the Alternate CSS is also applied to pages using the Simple.master, like the error.aspx.

 

 

I chose to copy the files within layouts to a sub folder and then modify the copied files.  This also requires you to modify the web application's "_layouts" virtual directory, but on a positive it doesn't affect the entire farm.  The process is detailed here "Customising application pages in the Layouts folder (I chose method 2)" http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/944105/en-us

 

 

Change <SharePoint:CssLink runat="server" Alternate="false"/>

 

To <SharePoint:CssLink runat="server" Alternate="true"/>

 

The error pages now picks up the CSS specified in the AlternateCssUrl property.  Surely this would of made sense to be set by default ... never mind :)

 

Before ...

 

After ...