Simon Fell > Its just code > SPS

Developing a love/hate relationship with Sharepoint Portal Server 2.0, I like the heterogeneous search capabilities, the personalization support, the extensibility through webparts, but I hope you really really like the default look and feel, cause its somewhere between extremely painful and impossible to change the look & feel. The state of the html/css would drive Brad to insanity, for grins I ran it through the html and css validators, the html has over 120 validation errors and the css over 50. I eventually managed to alter the css enough to get a new color scheme, only to then notice that not all the pages use that same css file (I think because some of the pages that appear to be in the portal are actually WSS pages). Despite the web parts making good use of ASP.NET's control model, the rest of the pages don't seem to make very good use of ASP.NET at all, a lot of the page structure is split across the aspx pages and some portal specific controls. Simple things like removing the SPPS banner graphic seem to be impossible because its coded into a control. As I mentioned before the layout is managed with heavily nested tables, some of the table based structures are rendered by the controls, so you can't move to a tabless layout without re-writing the controls.