I recently created a new master page and deployed it as a feature to my SharePoint site following the articles from Heather Solomon (Create a Feature: Master Pages for Site Collections) and Chakkaradeep (SharePoint WCM – Breaking the Ice – Building the initial Master Page). I deployed the feature and activated it on my Site Collection. The next step was how to set the master page.
Both these articles explain how this is done – via the ‘Master Page‘ option under ‘Look and Feel‘ on the ‘Site Settings‘ page. Quickly going to this page I hit a major problem – it wasn’t there. After doing a quick dig around I found out why – it is only available on a ‘Publishing Site‘ by default and my site collection root site was a ‘Blank Site‘. What was I going to do – I didn’t want to have to go into every site and change the master page using SharePoint Designer manually?
After a bit of further digging I found the solution. Within the ‘Site Features‘ on the ‘Site Settings‘ page there is a feature called ‘Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure’. When activated this provides the options to manage master pages on your SharePoint sites. Of course, as is alluded to in the above articles this feature is only available in MOSS and not in WSS .