Deploying Branding as a Feature across multiple site collections

Question

I'm Junior dev trying to get my head around SharePoint so I was hoping someone might be able to help me out with some issues I'm having.

I'm in the process of complying a new branding solution for our internal intranet as my company has recently changed their logos/color palettes etc. We have numerous different color palettes that can be used and I've been asked to develop it in a way such that teams can pick and choose between which ones they want to use.

The easiest solution I've been able to come up with is having multiple web scoped features, one for each of the available color palettes, which on activation while update the site's css/masterpage/images as appropriate.

The problem I'm running in to is that when I attempt to activate the web scoped feature on sites in different site collections I'm getting a "File Not Found" error message from SharePoint.

Now I'm assuming this because the .wsp when deployed is deployed to a specific site collection and the files aren't available outside of the collection while the feature is still visible due to it's scope.

Could anyone offer me some insight in to how I might deploy my solution in such a way that I can retain having my branding features work across multiple site collections.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I solved it this way:

1. Create a site collection feature which is responsible for deploying font/spcolor files, master page, Background Image etc.
2. Create a web scoped Feature which sets the theme, masterpage, font and the Background image in FeatureActivated-Method.
3. Establish a Feature dependency, so the web Feature can only be activated when the site collection Feature is already activated.
4. Implement Feature stapling: so every new Sub web sites activates the web Feature automatically.