Customizing OOB web parts in SharePoint 2013

Question

I've done a lot of digging and still have yet to find a good solution to customizing out of the box web parts using SharePoint 2013. I basically just want to change the appearance of the discussion board web part but there is no easy way to apply CSS to it without effecting everything else on the site that uses those classes (since I can't apply ID's to the html and the ID's supplied are specific down to a GUID). The best way I've found so far is to use jQuery which sounds like a horrific method to maintain. Any ideas?

Answer 1

The Discussion board is yet another List View so you can apply custom XSL to it. This is maybe the recomended SharePoint like way, but dealing with XSL is time consuming and if your XSL file has even one error in it, the SharePoint would reject it and reverse the dafault list view so this costs patience and precision.

One you have completed your custom XSL you can apply it by accessing the webpart properties (in Edit mode) -> Miscellaneous -> XSL Link (where you specify where your XSL file is located on the server)