Essential SharePoint

Chapter 3. Applying Templates, Themes, and Styles

SharePoint provides several tools that give you a leg up when creating new sites and customizing their appearance:

• Site templates provide solutions to the most commonly performed tasks.

• List templates define fields and views for common data tables used by sites.

• Themes control the colors and backgrounds used by pages within the site.

• Cascading style sheets manage the fonts used on pages.

As you use SharePoint and integrate it into your workplace, you'll want to add your own look and feel to these components. For example, you might want to add a Picture Library list to every new workspace or a thumbnail image column to the Contacts list. In fact, you might want to create entirely new templates to solve common tasks unique to your workplace.

This chapter tells you how to create your own site and list templates. First, I provide an overview of what comes with SharePoint Services so you don't reinvent the wheel; then I cover modifying those templates and incorporating the changes into SharePoint. Finally, I explain how to customize the themes and style sheets that control the appearance of sites.

Understanding Templates

SharePoint includes a set of predefined site and list templates. Each site template includes a set of predefined lists and features a home page that displays or links to the content of those lists. Table 3-1 describes the use and content of each of the predefined site templates.

Table 3-1. Predefined site templates

Template