Portal Alternate Header

I received a comment from Sunil on SharePoint customisation, and I decided to make a post of of my reply. It was great to receive a comment, firstly furthering the sharing of knowledge, secondly it's great to know that someone is reading my blog! Hey all you lurkers out there, drop a comment sometime, it's the sort of thing that motivates us to post more information.. ;-)

anyway, back to the question...

is there any way where I can change the home page of portal server and all following site pages ( not my sites) will have the same. I tried the alternateheader, but I don't know where I made the mistake none of the pages got changed or no changes error happend also. no change.

There are a couple of options available to you with SPS. You can specify an alternate image for the top corner, and an additional CSS stylesheet through the SharePoint administration interface. However it sounds like you want more substantive changes.

WSS sites are created from a single template, either STS or MPS. However SPS sites are made up from multiple templates under the system 60 directory :- SPSBWEB, SPSCOMMU, SPSNEWS, SPSNHOME, etc..

Thus, any changes you make must be made to the ONET.XML file must be made to all the SPS?????/xml/onet.xml files. Additionally, they must be made before you create the portal site.

However, the Portal ONET.XML files already have an alternate header defined, "PortalHeader.aspx" which you can find in the layouts/1033 directory (presuming you are using the 1033 locale). So, you can edit that file to implement changes to the portal header.

Except, no, you can't really.

Without going into great detail on the SharePoint architecture, all sharepoint pages are based on an .aspx template somewhere under the /60/ directory. Some of those templates contain a line of code saying:-

<%
string alternateHeader = SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context).AlternateHeader;
if (alternateHeader == null || alternateHeader == "")
{
%>

Pages that contain this statement will show any changes that you make to PortalHeader.aspx. Pages that don't, won't. Unfortunetly the only pages that have this statement are admin pages under the layouts/1033 directory. Even then, its not all of them.

Pages that the end user sees run under a different architechure to the administration pages. So how do you edit the header on these pages? So far, the only method I am aware of is to edit every single template file. There are about 100 per language for STS sites (web part page and list templates), I haven't worked out how many for portal sites, as I'd rather not even think about it. The most managable solution I have found is to use a javascript include that manipulates the DOM client-side at run-time, but this is only suitable for minor edits.

Anyone who has found how to use an alternate header properly across all pages, please raise your hand. Much kudos is available to whoever can draw the sword of customisation from the stone of SharePoint.