Whenever I start work on a new SharePoint install, I have a list of small changes that I make. Each one addresses a minor hitch in my workflow. But taken together, they often spell the difference between an enjoyable process and a frustrating one.

Herewith, some of the items on my list.

Turn off master page approval

By default, SharePoint requires administrator approval of all changes to master pages. While this is an admirable requirement in a production environment, it just gets in the way when first setting up a site. Every time I want to check in a change, I have to click out of a warning dialog, then go to a separate web page, where I have to go through a multi-step process to approve the changes.

If you have administrative access, you can turn off the approval requirement with these steps:

1. In the “Site Actions” menu, choose “Manage Content and Structure”.
2. Right-click on “Master Page Gallery” in the left menu.
3. Select “Edit Properties”
4. Select “Versioning Settings”
5. In the first section, you can choose whether content approval applies to that library.
6. In the second section, you can choose whether SharePoint should bother with minor versions or simply save major versions every time you save. Choosing “major versions only” will cut out a step whenever you save the master page.

When you’re done setting up the site, be sure to turn approval back on if multiple people will have access to the master page.

CSS Reset

If you want a clean (well, as clean as possible) CSS slate on which to start your styles, add Kyle Schaefer’s excellent CSS Reset to your master page. You pick some default settings, and CSS Reset generates a CSS file that applies them to the relevant SharePoint 2010 elements. It will save you a lot of repetitive styling effort.

Hide the first link in the top navigation menu

The first link in your navigation menu is generated by SharePoint from the site name, and so is usually something you don’t want. Unfortunately, SharePoint doesn’t apply unique classes or IDs to the menu items. So I just copy and paste the following code:

.s4-tn li.static > a {
    display: none !important;
}

.s4-tn li.static > ul a {
    display: block !important;
}

The first bit of CSS hides every item in the menu; the second bit re-shows everything but the first item.

Set up the favicon

You’d be surprised at how often you’ll see a SharePoint site that has been totally branded, but still has the default SharePoint favicon in the browser tab. Because it’s such an easy thing to overlook, I try to take care of it right at the beginning.

To add a custom favicon to the master page, create your “favicon.ico” file and put it in your Style Library. Then replace this line:

<SharePoint:SPShortcutIcon runat="server" IconUrl="/_layouts/images/favicon.ico"/>

with this:

<SharePoint:SPShortcutIcon runat="server" IconUrl="/PATH_TO_STYLE_LIBRARY_/Style%20Library/favicon.ico"/>

Favicons are notoriously persistent, as some browsers cache them in what seems like hundreds of places. So once you’ve changed out the favicon, check it on a “clean” browser: one that has not yet been used to hit your site.

If you need to generate an .ico file, there are several good generators out on the Web, such as favicon.cc. You can also get Photoshop plugins to make them yourself — like the one from Telegraphics.

Kill the chrome

My preference for web parts is that their chrome display be set to “none” by default, then set to something else on a case-by-case basis. I’m not a .Net developer, so I can’t do it programatically; but I *can* take advantage of a Web Part Zone setting.

Whenever I create a page layout, I routinely add the following property to any <WebPartZone> tag:

PartChromeType="none"

With that setting, any web part in that zone will start life with chrome set to “none”.

It only affects web parts that have not had their chrome state set manually; it is overridden by individual web-part settings.