Use secondary masterpage as default

Question

I am trying sharepoint in a small developing environment. I have a master frontpage that use a specific layout defined in a custom masterpage (master-front.master). It look like this

| left box | content box | right box |

and that frontpage will have subsites that I want to use another custom masterpage (master-main.master) that look like this:

| left box | content box |

But I cannot get it to work.

Under "Frontpage" I have a subsite called "Organization" where I have manually set the secondary masterpage. When I create i new subsite under "Frontpage" it gets the default sharepoint masterpage. But I want anything under "Frontpage" to use master-main.master.

Is there something I am missing?

Answer 1

Yes.. You're missing the whole concept of Master Pages and specifically Page Layout.

First of all, turn on Publishing Features.

Secondly, you dont really want to sepearte master pages, but you want 1 Master page with two different Page Layouts. Read more about the concept here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms543497(v=office.14).aspx