How to: Import a Master Page or Theme

You can give pages on your SharePoint site a consistent appearance by creating and using master pages and themes. Visual Studio doesn’t provide templates for these elements, but you can create them in SharePoint Designer and then import them into Visual Studio. For more information, see Building Block: Pages and User Interface on the Microsoft website.

To import a master page or theme

1. In Visual Studio, create or open a SharePoint project.

   For information about how to create a SharePoint project, see SharePoint Project and Project Item Templates.

2. On the menu bar, choose Project, Add New Item.

3. In the Add New Item dialog box, expand the SharePoint node, and then choose the 2010 node.

4. In the list of SharePoint templates, choose the Module template, and then specify a name for the module.

   A module contains files (for example, master page or theme files) for deployment to a location that you specify in SharePoint.

5. In the module, delete the default file, which is named Sample.txt.

6. Choose the module node.

7. On the menu bar, choose Project, Add Existing Item, and then choose the master page or theme file.

   Master page files have a .master extension, and theme files have a .thmx extension.

8. If you added a master page, change its Deployment Conflict Resolution setting to Automatic in the module’s properties.

   Note

   Errors can occur if the name of the master page is the same as the name of an existing master page that’s marked as either Default Master Page or Custom Master Page. For information about how to resolve this problem, see Walkthrough: Import a Custom Master Page and Site Page with an Image.

9. In the module, open Elements.xml.

   You must update the Elements.xml file to reference the master page or theme that you added.

10. For a master page, replace the existing module markup with the following markup.

    <Module Name="[Module Name]" Url="_catalogs/masterpage">
        <File Path="[Module Name]\[Master Page Name].master" 
          Url="[Master Page Name].master" Type="GhostableInLibrary" />
    </Module>
    

    For a theme, replace the existing module markup with the following markup.

    <Module Name="[Module Name]" Url="_catalogs/theme" 
        <File Path="[Module Name]\[Theme Name].thmx" Url="[Theme   
          Name].thmx" Type="GhostableInLibrary" />
    </Module>
    

    Be sure to replace the placeholder values with the actual names of the module and the master page or theme.

    The attribute Type="GhostableInLibrary" indicates that the item is added to the content database, and the Url attribute of the module specifies where to store the file in the SharePoint content database.

11. To change the deployment scope for a master page, in Solution Explorer, open the feature file in the Feature Designer, and then choose a new deployment scope from the Scope list.

    A value of Web means that the master page applies only to the website that’s currently specified in the project. A value of Site means that the master page applies to the current site collection, which includes all subsites and the root web. The other values don’t apply.

    Note

    Because themes apply only to the site collection level, we recommend that you don’t set the scope of a theme to anything other than Site. Errors can occur if a theme is used in a sub-site.

12. On the menu bar, choose Build, Deploy Solution.

13. To verify whether the files were deployed correctly, open the SharePoint site, choose the Site Actions menu, choose the Site Settings command, and then choose either the Master Pages link or the Themes link.

    The list of either master pages or themes appears and contains either the master page or the theme that you imported.

See Also

Concepts

Importing Items from an Existing SharePoint Site

Using Modules to Include Files in the Solution

Other Resources

Master Pages

Creating Pages for SharePoint