Book Review: SharePoint Branding in Practice

 

SharePoint Branding in Practice

by Yaroslav Pentsarskyy

 

SharePoint "branders" range from graphics designers who see everything as "art" to developers who see everything as code. This book covers the area towards the developer side. This book frequently uses Visual Studio and C# code and expects basic HTML, CSS, C#, XML, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio skills. Many of the examples need server side deployment, so this is not a book for Site Owners or someone limited to using SharePoint Designer for their customizations.

Many branding books and articles focus on SharePoint's publishing features, and therefore target SharePoint Server and not SharePoint Foundation. This book covers both SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server and includes how to brand basic Team Sites. The book has separate chapters on branding non-publishing sites, publishing sites, My Content sites, search sites and pages. There are also good getting started chapters on accessing both external and SharePoint web services and on customizing the ribbon.

A nice aspect of the book is that is starts with the basics, and moves on to the advanced. As an example, the author starts out with creating SharePoint Themes using PowerPoint (Microsoft's documented approach for site owners) and then moves on to creating custom themes using Visual Studio and features.

Source downloads are available from the author's web site.

While the content, examples and the flow of topics are well done, the book is missing an index and needs a good proof reading. That said, the book is quite good and is useful addition to both a brander's and a developer's SharePoint library.

 

 

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