If you don’t do much with theming and cascading style sheets, you probably don’t know or care that CSS 3 is coming fast. Some browsers already support it (Firefox 3.x, Safari), some don’t (IE); but the feature-set in CSS 3 is something that will make designers and developers very happy.
Here are the features I’ve played with so far in my demo environment:
Pretty cool stuff, here’s a screenshot of the page I’ve been messing with (viewed in Firefox 3.5.9):
If you’ve created publishing sites and then tried changing the theme on a sub-site, you’ve probably run into this issue:
You apply the theme and nothing changes!!!!!
For some reason or another, when Publishing features are enabled; sub-sites inherit the theme from their parent site. You can prevent this from happening by doing the following:
Open up the default master page for the site in SharePoint Designer and look for the following tag:
<meta name="Microsoft Theme" content="<Theme Name> 1011, default">
Either delete or comment-out this tag and then save your master page, you should no longer have this issue.
Have you wondered how you can get the Quick Launch to display fly out menus, similar to the Top-Link bar drop-down menus? It can be done with just a few small tweaks to the Master Page.
If you open up your default master page in SharePoint Designer and search for the following block, this is where you’ll edit:
<asp:AspMenu id="QuickLaunchMenu" DataSourceId="QuickLaunchSiteMap" runat="server" Orientation="Vertical" StaticDisplayLevels="1" ItemWrap="true" MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1" StaticSubMenuIndent="0" SkipLinkText="" >
By default, the highlighted portions are set to “2” and “0” respectively, by setting them to “1” it gives us the fly out functionality we were looking for, pretty cool!
The problem I ran into after getting this to work is the “fly out” container consists of a white background; no border and it seemed to inherit the font-color from my custom style sheet. That’s fine, or so I thought. Being that the background of my site is also white, it made it very difficult to see the fly out menu easily. I thought I could easily set the background via the CSS sheet like anything else, boy was I wrong!
After some searching, I found several people with the same problem and no easy fix; until I came across an MSDN article. Basically it showed that by applying the Tag to the SharePoint:AspMenu portion of the master page you could apply formatting to the “fly out”.
So I added that and at first I was following a blog post that said you could use something like to apply styles to the menu, I tried that and could not get it to work so I instead used the MSDN article and applied the formatting directly in the master page, and then I coordinated it with the CSS sheet to make sure the styles matched. Here is my DynamicMenuStyle code chunk after formatting:
<DynamicMenuStyle
backcolor="#FFFFFF"
forecolor="#0066cc"
borderstyle="Solid"
borderwidth="2"
bordercolor="#0066cc"
/>
After doing that I now have working, branded fly out functionality for both the Top Link Bar and Quick Launch Bars on my MOSS site.
SharePointRyan 
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