Customizing the "My Profile" CSS styles on SharePoint 2010

Question

Hello,

I'm trying to edit the CSS file of the "My Profile" page on my SharePoint 2010 solution. I need to change some colors and position of some elements. On my little research here, i found 2 ways to do it: 1º - Editing the mysite.master file 2º - Editing the portal.css on the root folder of the project.

I'm a little afraid of these methods because on the first, i'm not sure if the changes will be applied to the already existing pages, or if it'll be aplied just the the paged created after the changes are made. And on the second case, i'm really afraid of changing the core files of sharepoint (specially because i'm new to sharepoint).

Is there another way (a 'right' way) to achieve what i need or should i use one of the solutions above?

Thank you.

Answer 1

I came across a similar situation with SharePoint 2007. I wanted to apply a custom masterpage but SharePoint does not support that for the my profiles site. There is a way set the masterpage of a my profiles site using stsadm commands (by Gary Lapointe) but when I tried this, I got some errors (probably because the contents of my masterpage were specific to a sharepoint publishing site.) Changing My profiles masterpage is still not supported in SharePoint 2010.

My recommendation would be to create a SharePoint theme, install it on the my profiles site (ideally through stsadm commands). Then set the theme of the my profiles site to your theme.

I would not recommend changing any out of the box files. The above method will ensure that you changes won't be over-written next time Microsoft release a SharePoint update.

Have a look at my blog post which should help: http://blog.zebsadiq.com/post/SharePoint-2007-Themes-Strategy-for-customising-SharePoint-look-and-feel.aspx

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can create a new Master Page based on the "mysite.master" file, modify it, and then set that as the new Master Page for the My Site site collection.

From there, you can either create a theme to do branding/coloring or just include the custom CSS in your new Master Page.