Extracting a SharePoint 2007 Master Page to a Standalone Configuration

Question

Currently I'm tasked with taking an application, which is SharePoint 2007 mostly in the fact that it only uses the SharePoint Master page, and turning it into a standalone application. Has anyone ever found an easy way to "extract" the master page and all it's contents away from SharePoint and making it a standalone Master Page? All the SharePoint tools can be made unavailable but we need to keep the look and feel. Thanks!

Answer 1

While the SharePoint master page is also an ASP.NET master page, the out-of-the-box master contains a lot of controls that are dependent on SharePoint. Having said that, a lot of public-facing sites, and to a lesser extent intranet sites, are heavily customized and that often means that many of the SharePoint controls have been stripped out, or a "minimal master" has been used. In these cases the master page may end up closer to a basic ASP.NET master page.

So it depends how "SharePointy" your master page is as to how much work it will take to remove the SharePoint controls and replace them with custom controls or static HTML.

If you want a quick solution, and the content is fairly static, you could take a copy of the rendered HTML output and use that as the starting point for some static content to put in a simplified master page. The problem is that the markup might be a bit horrible.