Anyone using 960 Grid System or YUI 2 Grids CSS

Question

Anyone having experience with 960 Grid system and getting it to play nicely with SharePoint? I am intrested in experience from other CSS Framework and how successfull was your team in implementing this?

Answer 1

I'm using the 960 Grid system and it works rather well in SharePoint as well. It took some time in the beginning to figure out how to properly implement it in SharePoint, but eventually it worked out.

A typical rookie mistake with using the 960 Grid system in SharePoint is that at first you try to implement it in the masterpages, which partially is correct, but it is obviously the pagelayouts that you need to implement it in, as they are the ones used to contain all the content, and not the masterpage.

One of the biggest challenges is to make all SharePoint standards to play along on this. Because as you might now, a lot of the setups in e.g. the system pages, as well as webparts, are designed to use(/or use up to) 100% screen width, which makes lists, document libraries etc. very hard to follow the 960 Grid standards. You can find some blogs around the internet which explains how to make them apply to the 960 Grid, but it's a long and painfull process, which often leave myself to make 2 masterpages; One for the "front-end" part of the site and one for the system pages.

A good idea is to start out with Randy Drigill's Starter Masterpages for SharePoint as they are clear of a lot of the "annoying" html which the SharePoint v4.master contains. So that makes it easier to start with.

But as I mentioned, implementing it to the masterpage is one thing, but implementing it in to the Pagelayouts is where the core of the use of 960 Grid in SharePoint lies.