This final blog post (for now) in the SharePoint Branding Issues series is one regarding web parts and their branding issues. I’m assuming most of you know what web parts are. They are like mini applications within a web page. As they are so small, you’ll often add several of them together on the same web page. In other technologies, such applications are called widgets or gadgets or whatever. But basicly, their ideology is the same. A nice example is featured on live.com.
To get back to .NET, web parts are a new technology within ASP.NET (and unified in version 2). In previous versions of SharePoint, they used some custom made framework. And now in WSS 3.0, they are slowly migrating to the new ASP.NET 2 standard, which allows far more easy web part development. Finally to be complete, a few more statements regarding web parts. Web parts are placed within horizontal or vertical web parts zones. These zones can define the chrome style used for the web parts within. The web part chrome, for those who do not know, is a fancy word for its border decoration. Furthermore, the web parts need one single web part manager, per page, for.. well.. managing purposes. Finally, all of these concepts have a corresponding class within the System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts namespace. And basicly this is, in a nutshell, what web part infrastructure is all about.
Now, the thing with SharePoint. They decided to overwrite all of these classes (just as we would for a custom branding job in ASP.NET). But somewhy they made the decision to make the new classes all sealed. So basicly you can not change anything, except, of course, if you rewrite every single class… 
I know… And as one of my hungarian colleagues would say in such a situation: nice! 
The chrome in SharePoint consists of 5 fixed chrome types (Default, None, Title and Border, Title Only and Border Only). These are implemented in an internal SPChromeHelper. What this class does, is adding the following structure as chrome:
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<table>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
Depending of the style the first row, which is the header, will be generated or not. Accordingly CSS classes are attached to the rows, the inner div and the inner table. As you can imagine, this kind of structure can be really restrictive. It is very difficult to add gimmicks, like rounded corners, to such a composition.
What can we do then? Well, basicly, applying tricks and hacking our way in. To achieve this, once again, our friend is CSS. By adding some classes to the right place and by using some specific CSS selectors, one can manage to achieve some degree of customization. A possible solution could be to add a specific CSS tag name to the declaration of the zone tag in your page. This way you can reach its inner web parts through the use of CSS selectors. In most cases you can define your own zones, so this can potentially be a solution for the problem. Another, more obvious solution, consists of simply overwriting the fixed chrome type’s CSS styles. The issue here is that every web part has to be set with the correct fixed chrome type to display your customizations. Of course, you still have the same limitations as the previous solution, as the structure of the chrome is still the same. More over, you usually cannot reach all generated HTML tags using only the fixed CSS class names.
While writing this article, I found this post written by Daniel Terborn. Daniel tackled the same problem and supplied another possible solution. He decided to create a base web part which implements all of the layout. Finally, with some CSS hooks, he manages to get really nice web parts. The problem with this solution is that it only applies to custom written web parts. In some situations this can be acceptable (by only using custom web parts), but most of the time you’ll want to use the out-of-the-box web parts too, for obvious reasons.
Conclusion? There is no clean and neat solution for web part branding within the current iteration of SharePoint products. We can only hope the sealed classes will be opened up in future versions. Until then, happy SharePointing.
