Now that MOSS is available to lots of people, and people are building lots of sites that don’t look like SharePoint, a lot of you might be wondering how you should get started in building your own custom master page for your site. I talked a little bit about this in my first post on building tylerbutler.com, but I think it might be valuable to post some info about the minimal master page and its role in helping you build a custom master page for your site. But first, some background…

During the early betas, people heard that you could make SharePoint “not look like SharePoint,” and so they set off to do just that. People started cracking open default.master and trying to understand it. The problem many people reported was that the markup in default.master was ridiculously complicated, and it wasn’t clear what could be removed and what couldn’t. The complexity is somewhat necessary for that master page because of all the delegate controls we have to put in place to support a bunch of different back-end SharePoint stuff (I do believe, however, that there’s plenty of things we could/can do in that master page to make it clearer and easier to customize without removing functionality, so this is not meant to be an excuse).

Anyway, there were customers that were trying to build internet facing sites on top of SharePoint, because a) we told them that they could/should and b) we rolled up a lot of web content management functionality from Content Management Server 2002, and customers that were using that product were investigating how they would move to MOSS. These customers did not want their site to look anything like SharePoint. These customers also often had a site design template that was coming from their design team, either in HTML or as image mock-ups. Trying to fit that design into default.master was exceedingly difficult because of all the unclear markup in that master page. Default.master is designed for a SharePoint site – one that looks and acts like SharePoint. But people who wanted to build non-SharePoint looking sites were getting tripped up by using it as a starting point.

We do have several master pages that we built that are much simpler than default.master. When you provision a Publishing Portal site collection, for example, we default to BlueBand.master, which has customized CSS and MOSS navigation out of the box. It’s a cleaner starting point, so we initially told people to start there rather than with default.master. We still had problems, though, because you never knew if a placeholder was absolutely necessary in your master page. What would happen is you’d remove a seemingly innocuous placeholder and your page would work fine until you browsed to some specific page that was overriding that placeholder, then things would break.

What we needed was a sample master page that included only the markup that was absolutely necessary to get your pages to render. Thus, the minimal master page was born. This master page is purposely bare. It’s just a bunch of placeholders – those placeholders are necessary for things in your site to work properly. With this master page, you can take your markup from your designer, paste it into SharePoint Designer, and move markups into the appropriate placeholders. If there’s some pieces you need/want from default.master or another page, you can always open them up and copy/paste the appropriate markup.

So, should you start with default.master, blueband.master, or the minimal master page example when building your own custom master page? Well, the answer depends on what you’re trying to do. If you’re building out a site that really should look and work like vanilla SharePoint, then maybe default.master makes sense. If you’re trying to do something more exotic, blueband.master and its siblings have examples of different navigational structures and color schemes, so maybe it makes sense to start from one of those that is close to the navigation/color you’re aiming for. But my personal recommendation is to start with the minimal page and copy/paste the appropriate controls/markup from other master pages as necessary. This ensures you get only what you need and want in your page, rather than having to weed through a bunch of markup to get rid of stuff that doesn’t look like it’s needed. If you do want to go the default.master route, then Heather Solomon has a custom master page that she’s tweaked from default.master to make things cleaner and more straightforward.

I hope this helps you figure out how to get started building out your site look and feel. There is a growing number of live custom sites on top of MOSS, and it’s exciting to see what people are able to build with this product!