I’m working on deploying a masterpage and a page layout as part of a solution package for my current client.  I finished designing both files and have added them to my solution.  I verified that neither had any of the “extra” markup that SharePoint Designer adds when you create files.  I deployed the solution to my environment and everything worked as expected.

I then needed to make a change to the page layout.  So, I made the change in the solution and re-deployed the .wsp only to find that my page layout didn’t get updated.  I opened up SPD to find that my page layout was marked as “customized”!  I checked all of the usual gotchas with regards to this issue (search Google) and even tried to “Revert to Site Definition”.  Nothing worked.

I then noticed that Visual Studio had made all of my “<asp:Content>” tags lowercase (<asp:content>).  Surely that couldn’t be the issue, right?  Wrong.  I changed them back to “<asp:Content>” and everything worked as expected.

I guess I should have known better since I’ve had this issue in the past with SharePoint 2007 (http://ericcwebb.com/2011/01/18/sharepoint-page-layouts-extra-markup-added/).  However, I at least got an error message with that issue.

Apparently, MS didn’t make every account managed. I just ran into an issue today where the default content access account automatically reset it’s password and it didn’t get updated in the search service. As a result, all crawls started to fail.

Adding .ms-dialog in front of some additional styles allowed me to remove my page background image and remove the fixed width in my container div.  Good deal.

Why? Because once you open that page layout in SharePoint Designer, it gets un-ghosted. This does two things. First, it means that you have to make changes in SharePoint Designer. The .aspx file in the feature directory is no longer used when rendering pages based on that page layout. Second, if you’ve attached a code-behind to the page, you’ll get a error indicating that type is not registered as safe. This occurs because SharePoint uses a type-safe parser on all un-ghosted content.

If you’ve come accross this post because you already did open the page layout in SPD, have no fear. To remedy your error, simply go to Site Actions…Site Settings…Reset to Site Definition. Once you do that, re-deploy your feature containing the page layout. Now, your page layout is ghosted.

Update: Well, I ran into an issue where “Reset to Site Definition” just didn’t work. So, I tried the stsadm command here (with -force): http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/09/re-ghosting-pages.html and now we’re back to un-ghosted. Very frustrating.

.ms-topnav a
{
	border-left-style:solid !important;
	border-left-color:#fff !important;
	border-left-width:1px !important;
	padding: 0 10px 0 10px;

}

However, this leaves the border on the first element of the navigation, which we don’t want. There’s no way to select that element using just CSS, so JQuery to the rescue:

$(document).ready(function(){

	$(".ms-topNavContainer").each(function() {

        var links = $(this).find("a");

        if (links.length > 0) {
            var link = links[0];
            $(link).addClass("navLast");
        }

    });

});

The CSS for “navLast”:

a.navLast
{
	border-left-style:none !important;
}

The interesting thing here is that it has to be “a.navLast”. For some reason, “.navLast” doesn’t work. Also, you can’t use “border-left” to add the dividers. You have to use the individual styles (most likely because of the inline styles on the element).

/* Top Bar */
.ms-globalbreadcrumb
{
	background-color:#7caf72;
}

/* Header */
.ms-globalTitleArea
{
	background:none !important;
}

/* Navigation */
.ms-bannerContainer, .ms-pagemargin, .ms-navframe, .ms-leftareacell
{
	background:none !important;
}
.ms-nav
{
	background-image:none !important;
}
.ms-topnavContainer, .ms-topnavselected, .ms-topnav {
	border: none;
	background: none;

}

table.ms-topnavselected, table.ms-topnav {
	height: 30px;
	margin-left: 1px;
	margin-right: 1px;
}
.ms-topnavContainer div
{
	background-color:transparent !important;	
}
.ms-topNavFlyOuts, .ms-topNavFlyOuts a:link
{
	background-color:transparent !important;
}
/* Body */
body {
	text-align: center; 
	margin: 0px auto;
}
body.ms-BuilderBackground {
    text-align: left !important;}
.ms-main
{	
    background: #fff;  
    width: 1020px !important;
    height: 100%; 
    margin: 0px auto !important;	
    border-bottom:10px #7caf72 solid;
}
table.ms-main 
{
	text-align: left;
}
/* Gets rid of default light blue background everywhere */
.ms-pagemargin, .ms-nav, .ms-pagebottommargin, .ms-pagebottommarginleft, 
.ms-pagebottommarginright, td.ms-rightareacell div.ms-pagemargin, .ms-titlearealeft,
.ms-titlearearight, .ms-titleareaframe, .ms-pagetitleareaframe, 
.ms-pagetitleareaframe TABLE, .ms-bodyareapagemargin, .ms-bodyareaframe, 
.ms-areaseparatorright, .ms-areaseparatorleft
{
	background: transparent !important;
	border: none;
}

.ms-pagebreadcrumb a {
	background-color: transparent;
	color:#fff;
}

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638968.aspx