Publishing Layout - Custom Master page

Question

I've been slowing catching on to the Publishing pages functionality. I'm still a bit confused on the creation of Publishing Types (such as Page, Page Layout and Publishing Master page)

The issue I'm running into is specifying on a specific page layout what master page to use. By going through the site settings, I can change the entire site's master page, but ideally what I would like to do is: - Create a Publishing Master page layout (custom.master) - Create the Page Layout that uses the above master page (customLayout.aspx) - Create a page from the web admin, that will allow me to use the pre-defined regions of the customLayout.aspx

This all seems pretty forward, but even creating a new layout wasn't intuitive, as you had to first declare it as a new content type and create a new page based on it. Here's MS's tutorial on it: Create a Publishing page layout

As you can see in their tutorial, we're using the "page" parent type, but it's later on used to create a layout? I guess there's a disconnect.

There is no indication as to how the master page can be associated with the page's layout and adding the masterpage type entry to the .aspx page did absolutely nothing.

Any help (and explanation) would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Master page in SharePoint publishing site is set on a web level , Once you set the master page,all the publishing master page will use the custom master page.So if you check SPWeb.CustomMasterUrl Property

P.S there are 2 types of page in a site , site page and application page.If you would like to brand application page you need to set the SPWeb.MasterUrl Property

Page layout You can regard Page layout as page template,it will control your UI.The reason the page layout binds to contentType is that for the same data you can present them in a different manner(using different page layout)