Hi all,

This book is great, a big thank you to all the authors who worked so hard on this!

I've run into a bit of an issue I could use some help with. I have applied my custom branding via a custom Master Page and CSS, which worked beautifully. Is there anyway I can have my custom branding applied by default when a user creates a new site?

Currently within Site Actions > Site Settings > Master Pages, I have my custom Master Page set as the following option.

Specify a master page to be used by this site and all sites that inherit from it:

However when a new site is created, the default SP Master Page is applied. I would appreciate any advice on this!

Thanks!
Steve

Thanks for the kind words about the book! The topic of branding deployment is such a massively wide and deep one -- in the book we decided to stick to the decision points along the way. I debated getting more specific with some examples but worried the chapter would end up being 100 pages

The question you ask is a great one though. Fortunately, this topic was covered on MSDN in a great little whitepaper. In general, you don't need to worry about setting the CSS like in the example. The preferred way to do that is to reference the CSS in your master page -- but there are some instances where it can be useful so it is worth seeing in the example. But I normally remove that part. Take a look though and hopefully this will do the trick!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg447066.aspx

John Ross
SharePoint Server MVP | Sr. Consultant SharePoint911

John,
Thanks for posting that. An informative, recent article from an authoritative source. Both Ted Pattison and MSDN back that up. I didn't know you could do that with a sandboxed solution and a workflow. Awesome!
Tom