Developing SharePoint Online master pages

Question

Here's the main question: what is the best practices for designing custom master pages on SharePoint Online?

Here's some background info: I've been designing and developing SharePoint master pages on various on-premises platforms. My usual design and development process is as follows:

1. Design in HTML
2. Use "Design Manager" to upload and convert the HTML page
3. Use the "Snippet Gallery" to customize web part zones
4. Create page layouts
5. Enable the new master page via "Site Settings" > "Master page"

Is this the best practice for SharePoint Online?

I do a lot of work in Visual Studio and use TFS for source control. In the past, SharePoint 2013 allowed the development of master page and any customized page layouts to be packaged as SharePoint solution file (.WSP) then deployed via SharePoint PowerShell as a farm solution.

Is there a method to do this for SharePoint Online or must I use the "Design Manager" to manage customized branding solutions for the master pages and page layouts?

Answer 1

Microsoft strongly discourage custom master pages for SPO. The main reason is as you know SPO is evolving and is the out of the box master pages. Once a major change is made its very hard to propagate those to custom master pages.

Recommended approach is to make use of the SharePoint themes.

To answer your question - the steps you outlined looks good. Make use to design manager.

For packaging master page please refer to Patter and Practices sample - https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP/tree/master/Samples/Provisioning.PublishingFeatures

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/master-pages-sharepoint-add-in