SharePoint Branding Issues: MOSS Search Center
When searching in MOSS, your results are shown in the search center. This is a special site you can create within your MOSS site collection. When using the default master pages, everything looks nice. The search box is in some blue area, while results get listed on the page. So far, no problem.
Say you want to develop a new master page. You take your basic place holders and arrange them on your page, the way it best fits your design. One of those placeholders is called PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb. What does this place holder contain? You might have guessed it, it should contain the breadcrumb of the page. And this is very crucial. Master pages are a technology which rely on “design by contract“. This is a special way of designing based on trust. In our master page we add content place holders to enhold specific parts of page. We give them specific locations and identifiers and we expect the correct functionality in it. Sadly, this is not always the case.
The search center is one of those areas not respecting the content place holders. Let’s look what will happen, when changing the master page of our site. (And once again, I’m just switching to a MOSS master page)
As you can see, the layout of the pages is somewhat disturbed? Why? The page layouts, which are used in those pages, give another meaning to our PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb place holder. They have the complete search box logic in it. A valid question here would be: why? Well, my guess is: the search looks nice when used in the default master page. They wanted to distinguish the search box area from the results. So they added the search box in the PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb. Now, for people who have moved this place holder (to the top, for example) within their custom master page, this can be a serious problem.
The solution, per se, is not that complicated, nor hard to apply. You just open up the two page layouts (SearchMain.aspx and SearchResults.aspx in your site collection’s masterpage catalog) move the search boxes from the PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb to the PlaceHolderMain. And you’re done, quite simple. But this is not where the problem resides. What to do with your other search centers in your farm? … Let me think… How about altering the files directly on the disk in the 12 Hive? This way, when provisioning, the search centers will have a nice layout in all master pages? Ok, but what if your distributing the thing? Well, in this case, one could provide some altered page layouts to use, and dynamically switch the old ones to the new ones in a feature receiver. And so on, and so on…
I hope most of you will realize these practices are mere patching up work. They are not giving a real solution. Sadly, most of the times, this is what we have to do to get things done. The true solution consists of conventions, and keeping them applied. Unfortunately, in a team as big as the development team of Office, this can be quite cumbersome. Hopefully they’ll keep that in mind for next iterations, and try to be more consistent. 
Until next time!
April 21st, 2008 at 22:54
Thanks for this info! It was not obvious to me that I could just move the search box; that tiny tidbit helped! Also I agree in general about patching things up just to keep SharePoint working–I don’t like it and seem to have to do it a lot.