Brand modern SharePoint Online sites

With SharePoint Online modern sites the branding options that used to available with Classic sites were removed, however Microsoft introduced new alternatives to apply you company brand to SharePoint.

The new theming experience allow site owners to apply themes to all modern pages in the site collection, to deliver new engaging and familiar looks.

By default, there are 8 themes available but you as an Administrator can create and deploy your owns, in this article you will find instructions on how to achieve it.

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By João Ferreira Mar 11, 2018 Branding, Office 365 12 Comments

Create a page layout with custom content areas

Page layouts are essential on SharePoint publishing sites, they enable the creation of content with specific editable fields.

There are predefined content areas that can be reused however sometimes they are not enough to build the perfect layout.

In this article I’ll explain you how to create a basic custom page layout with multiple Page Content areas also known as Rich HTML Field.

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By João Ferreira Feb 1, 2018 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 2 Comments

Change the color of SharePoint modern experience automatically

SharePoint modern experience is available for Lists, Document Libraries and Pages and while it delivers new functionalities to the end users it lacks some of the customization options available in the classic SharePoint.

The modern experience is provided with a theme that is responsible to format the colors of the elements in the page. On modern site collections like group and communication sites there’s a native interface that allows the administrator to control the color theme, but on classic site collections things are a little bit different and the modern experience will receive a random color applied automatically.

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By João Ferreira Dec 5, 2017 Branding, Office 365 3 Comments

Build a breadcrumb using SPFx extensions

A few months ago, I’ve built a solution to add the breadcrumb navigation to all SharePoint sites and pages. While that solution still works fine on SharePoint 2013, 2016 and on the classic experience of SharePoint online it no longer works for the modern sites.

In the previous solution I used a script link to add the breadcrumb globally to the site collection, this functionality was disabled by Microsoft in the modern experience and it was replaced by the SPFx Extensions.

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By João Ferreira Oct 11, 2017 Branding, Development, Office 365 9 Comments

Customize SharePoint from Mac OS

Create and edit SharePoint files form Windows is simple with SharePoint Designer but if you are a Mac user, you are in though spot!

You can do pretty much everything from the browser but upload a file every time you want to change CSS is a tedious process.

In this article, I’ll explain how you can save time and how you can get access to all the files and folders needed to customize SharePoint sites from your Mac.

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By João Ferreira Feb 22, 2017 Branding, SharePoint 5 Comments

Fix publishing pages with custom page layouts created from template

This article is a continuation of my previous article that explains how to save publishing sites as templates.

Per the feedback received some people was not able to access the sites created with the template, this happens with sites that include pages with custom page layouts.

Before getting into details about how to fix this please notice that the previous article is a hack to save the site as a template, save site as a template is disabled in all Publishing sites and other type of sites with publishing features active, this means that the hack may not work in all SharePoint scenarios.

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By João Ferreira Jan 29, 2017 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 3 Comments

How to fix 401 error after applying a custom master page to SharePoint

This is a short article but it can save you precious time when you apply a custom banding to your SharePoint site.

After applying a custom master page to the site some pages or all of them may start displaying a 401 error, this happens on collaboration sites and system pages namely Team Sites where you have minimal download strategy feature activated.

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By João Ferreira Jan 24, 2017 Branding, SharePoint 0 Comments

Save publishing site as a template

Save your newly created SharePoint site as a template can save you a lot of time if you want to replicate it again in your environment.

Unfortunately if you used a Publishing Site or if you had to activate the Publishing Features in a Collaboration Site, save site as a template will not be available.

In this article I explain all the steps to bring back this feature to the publishing sites and also the extra steps you may need to activate all site features.

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By João Ferreira Oct 5, 2016 Branding, Office 365, SharePoint 16 Comments

This is the start of something new

Hello World! 🙂 My name is João Ferreira and I’m a SharePoint developer.

I’ve been collecting a series of tips and tricks over the last few years related with SharePoint and I’ve now decided to share it with you guys.

In this blog you will find articles about SharePoint development but also a lot of stuff related with the SharePoint branding, I’ll tell you everything about making SharePoint beautiful.

I have planned this blog for over a year and I think today is a good day to finally release it since it’s also the day of the official release of SharePoint 2016.

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By João Ferreira May 4, 2016 Branding, Development, News, Office 365, SharePoint 0 Comments