I have had a ton of feedback regarding my original posting for custom Chrome / Branding of MOSS.
One of the dialogs got very specific and I wanted to share a little more here in an effort to clarify some Best Practices for customizing MOSS.
I want to clarify that product documentation on MOSS is not complete, it is still in B2 bits, and Best Practices are my take on what they should be when it comes to customizing the back-end, and in no way reflects anything directly from Micrsoft at this time.
Many of you are probably very familiar with how to customize WSS/v2 from the old days - including SPS 2003. It was not a pretty picture and was fairly tedious.
Today you actually have a wealth of development-level customization available to you.
OOB (out of the box) MOSS does in fact deploy some extensive core-level components that we DO NOT want to customize. Let me explain...
One of my feedbacks dealt with needing to customize the default.master and core.css for a given site deployment. Can you do this? Absolutely - but it will not be intuitive and it is prone to blow up your environment. There is simply way too much underpinning MOSS - and too many undocumented controls and AJAX to try and exhaust this topic here. Suffice to say, stay away from this approach. It is easy to fall into this thinking simply because of the old days - but your lives have truly been made easier. I'll explain more.
When you create your site collection, like the Internet Presence Web Site in my example, I am provided a set of master pages (MP's) OOB. Let's say I create My Company Site and use the Inet Pres. Web Site template. And I create it on myMachineName:10000 for a port.
Open SharePoint Designer now (which you install separate from MOSS - these bits are in the B2 client download area). File-->Open Site and open http://myMachineName:10000 for the site.
What's absolutely fantastic about Designer is how it provides you a solution view in essence, of your new Site Collection (much like Visual Studio would present your C# or VB or ASP application solution). I think this is a great leap for MSFT and the development community. HOWEVER - I miss C#. Anyway...
Expand _catalogs and you'll find a Master Page gallery here. Expand that and take a look. You find TopNavFlyOuts.master, and also a few others. And yes, there is a default.master as well.
The default.master is the MOSS system-level master page. Stay away from it. MOSS will use it depending on the context of what you are doing / creating in your site. However, you can customize any of the other MP's, or even import your own totally custom MP - and from here you can literally control all of you look/feel.
Some of you already know that when MOSS serves up MP's - it is looking for asp:PlaceHolders in the MP. This is OOB behavior that we have to live with - and it's not too bad. Basically stated, if you want to import a completely custom MP - you must include the placeholders that MOSS will be looking for.
A great way to get started is simply copy/paste all of the placeholders from TopNavFlyouts.master, create a new blank MP and paste them there. Then set them all to nothing.
Now begin your own page layout and setup - simply using the placeholders you'll need at the time you need them (like the Sign-in control for eg).
I have not found a lot of documentation that speaks to these placeholders and the roll they'll play as MOSS matures - but I've resolve how to work with them.
Also, I know hand's-down - the only customizing I can do that is super effective is that of the provided MP's, or the introduction of my own MP's - I do not attempt to customize the OOB stuff (specifically, default.master, core.css, controls.css, etc.).
Also, for the sample OOB MP's you get, you'll find a supporting CSS file in the Style Library-en-us-Core Styles. So, for TopNavFlyouts you'll find a TopNavFlyouts.css, and likewise for LeftNavFlyouts, etc.
Whatever site collection template you choose, you'll see different OOB templates and look/feel. But open that site in Designer and take a look at the MP's available to you. Do not get trapped into thinking you must customize the base-line MOSS stuff.
Finally, feel free to play with creating your own MP's. Just remember to create a corresponding style sheet, and make sure it's stipulated in the Master Page Settings for that site under the Alternate CSS URL.
I hope this helps clarify some things I did not speak directly to in my initial posting.