Have you ever tried to assign a custom master page to the system pages in SharePoint?

This is what I used to do up to now.

Create a feature that deploys the master pages.

add in the onet.xml to the configuration with id 0  the following two lines:

MasterUrl=~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/My.master
CustomMasterUrl=”~SiteCollection/_catalogs/masterpage/My.master”

Deploy the solution.

Check that the masterpages are there and that they are used by the site created using my template template … Only the default master page is set but the system master page isn’t set.

I then had a look at the following page

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb687712.aspx

What did I do wrong?

I created my module within a feature.

instead of adding the following to my onet.xml.

[code lang=text]
<Module Name=”MyMasterPages” Url=”_catalogs/masterpage”>
<File Url=”My.master” Type=”GhostableInLibrary”>
</File>
</Module>
[/code]

So what went wrong then?

It’s all about the order that things get activated. I was creating the master page after the site was created using my site collection feature.

Adding the master page using a module in the onet.xml resolved this issue.

Avatar for Pieter Veenstra

By Pieter Veenstra

Business Applications Microsoft MVP working as the Head of Power Platform at Vantage 365. You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com

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