Altering Master Pages for My Sites (outside of MySite15.master)

Question

I am working on customizing a SharePoint Farm and it's Master Pages. I have had substantial success altering the general Site collections within the 15\TEMPLATE\GLOBAL path of the Hive through the Seattle.master file. Even the 'Site Contents' and 'Site Settings' pages adhere to the alterations.

I will not be using any feature stapling techniques, and have no problems with editing the source files in the Hive. I am completely aware of the consequences.

My issue arises with the My Site site collection. I am unable to alter a Hive based Master Page to affect this site. The mysite15.master pages within the '15\TEMPLATE\Features' directory do not affect the sites. I am forced to alter the mysites15.master file that is relative to the My Site site collection through SharePoint Designer to get the desired effects, however, only the 'Newsfeed' and 'About Me' sections are altered. The 'Blog' section of the My Site site collection is altered with the Seattle.master page in the GLOBAL folder.

My question is, how do I alter the 'Apps' section (MySitePath/_layouts/15/viewlists.aspx) and the 'Tasks' sections (MySitePath/AllTasks.aspx) of the My Site collection?

Answer 1

If you open/edit those aspx pages in the hives, what does the masterpage list?

I think you have to realize that a lot of the content that is pushed to the hives are in-fact coming from the content database(s) for local server use. In my opinion (and probably many others), you should try to rethink your scenario or business problem and come up with another solution. To be frank, what you are doing here is beyond the realm of bad practice of altering hive content. What is the reasoning for doing this? Let's get to the bottom of why you want to do it this way and how we can change it.