Customising My Sites
9 November, 2015
Customising My Sites
I’ve been asked a few time about how to customise the MOSS My Sites. Unlike SharePoint 2003, the reality is that it’s not easy. It may seem like a retrograde step, but as they are so powerful, adding a facility to modify all of them becomes difficult.
The easiest and most obvious way, altering the templates, is not supported as they are considered a core part of SharePoint. It will work, but Microsoft do not guarantee that they won’t be overwritten in any upgrade.
That leaves the only way is by running some custom code. This isn’t great for anyone who isn’t a developer. If you want how it’s done, Steve Peschka has some great information on how to do this on his blog. Even better than this, he has wrapped it all up as part of the Community Kit Project for SharePoint on CodePlex and released it as MySiteCreate.
What MySiteCreate allows you to do is specify a different master page for the My Sites and also specify web parts and their properties in an xml file. No more messing around with code, just a great tool to let you get on with the job.