Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Designer 2007 Bible

13.2. Implementing Master Pages

Master pages is an ASP.NET 2.0 feature for implementing template-based Web site design. Like a DWT, you design a master page in SharePoint Designer that holds the common elements for your Web pages, identifies the locations you want to keep unique, and inserts unique areas at those locations on the master pages. Then, you can either create new Web pages based on the master page or attach the master page to existing Web pages.

Although the process that you follow to create and attach master pages in SharePoint Designer is similar to DWTs, the internal implementation of master pages is very different from that of DWTs. The major difference is that while the content of a DWT is copied over to the attached Web page, a master page is displayed with the unique content of the attached Web page at runtime when a Web page is rendered for display in a browser.

However, the concept described in the beginning of this chapter still holds true. The unique areas in a master page are defined by using ASP.NET 2.0 controls called content placeholders. So, on a master page that you design by using SharePoint Designer, you place content placeholder controls at the locations where you want to bring unique content from the attached Web page. If the attached Web page has unique content that needs to be displayed at the location of the content placeholder controls present in the master page, you have to place ASP.NET content controls on the Web page and then associate ...