Site Master Page vs. System Master Page
I have been scratching my head each time I got to working with the SharePoint 2010 master pages, which one do I need to change on the ChangeSiteMasterpage.aspx, so is the purpose of these two master pages clear to everyone:
After a bit of searching around I managed to find some information by Stefan Goßner Senior Escalation Engineer for SharePoint on the technet blog site that makes some sense.
By default the following rule applies:
- Site Master Pages: used by all publishing pages – and only by publishing pages
- System Master Pages: used by everything else including forms and view pages
You can use SharePoint Designer to change the master page assignment for individual pages if required.
If you open a page in SharePoint Designer you can see a MasterPageFile setting which can be modified:
- “~masterurl/default.master”: the page will use the system master page
- “~masterurl/custom.master”: the page will use the site master page
Going further into the master page issue I also found some information that states there is a third master page the Application.master that is used by by all the pages in the _Layouts virtual directory. These pages are the setup pages.
