I am learning a lot about customizing the look and feel of SharePoint Portal areas and some of the different options available. I'm trying to get a good feel for what is acceptable and what Microsoft says is a no-no.

From there, I want to learn how to better do some of the acceptable things. I am trying to establish some best practices for my company to follow when doing SharePoint implementations.

Can someone verify for me that the following is correct?

1) Individual portal area pages can be edited by opening the page in Front Page and making the changes. This will not change the underlying template, however, it will allow you to manually change an area page created from the template.

Advantages:

· Area pages can be made more unique, because the change is to the page itself, and has no effect on other pages based on the template.

· There is no danger that anything you do will get overwritten by Microsoft.

Disadvantage: However, if you have many portal areas, and you want them all to look the same, you would have to do them one by one in FrontPage.

2) You “could” (although you are really, really, really not supposed to) manually update the template files in the 1033 hive on the SharePoint server. This will change not only the template, but any pages previously created from the template, excluding those that have been previously modified using the Front Page method described above.

Advantage: You can make changes to many portal areas quickly.

Disadvantage: Per Microsoft, this is a big no-no. They don't want you messing with any of their files in the 1033 hive. In the event of a SharePoint Service Pack, there is no guarantee that MS will not overwrite any changes you've made to their files.

3) This is the one I am only recently learning about. You can create new templates for areas by adding a file called WEBTEMPSomethingNew.XML in the 1033\XML folder, which would mirror the WebTempSPS.xml file in the same folder. If you make copies of one or more of the SPS, SPSTOC, etc. folders, you can reference them in the WEBTEMPSomethingNew.XML, and have your own new templates to choose from.

Advantages:

· Ability to customize many pages at once.

· Does not break Microsoft’s rules.

· Supports an unlimited set of templates, so technically, multiple portals running on the same server can all have their own unique templates.

Is all of the above correct? Am I missing anything? Are there disadvantages to this last approach that I should be aware of?