This post on Delegate controls and Content Placeholders in SharePoint 2013 Publishing Master Page is an out come of one of my current task on a complex publishing web portal for both Internet and Intranet users using SharePoint 2013. Client’s requirements are to support all major browsers and smart phones. So I decided to explore the default publishing Seattle master page.
Here I have listed out my understanding .
· Cleanup the Master Page
· Identify the Delegate controls
· Identify the Master page regions
· Override the Delegate controls based on the customer requirements
· Reposition/hide the controls based on requirements
Cleanup the default Master Page
Before identifying the master page controls, I formatted the html markup tags using SharePoint Designer and provide the proper inline comments line by line. So that someone can easily understand the markup. You can find the formatted master page here.
Next I started listing out the Delegate Controls.
Delegate Controls
You can find here the complete list of delegate controls .We can easily override these controls with our custom implementations. In subsequent posts we can see how to override these Delegate Controls one by one.
| Delegate Control | Screen Shot | Descriptions |
| GlobalNavigation |  | To add the custom links globally. |
| GlobalSiteLink3 |  | To enable Farm level global links and not specific for web application or site collection level |
| SuiteBarBrandingDelegate |  | To override the default “SharePoint” text at left corner |
| SuiteLinksDelegate |  | To add more links like “Newsfeed”, “SkyDrive” |
| GlobalSiteLink0 |  | SharePoint uses this one to publish the variations menu. Please carefully override this Delegate control if needed |
| PromotedActions |  | To add more links between Share and Follow icon |
| PublishingConsole |  | While editing the page, Server Ribbon will be loaded using this Delegate Control and we extend this using Custom Action |
| SmallSearchInputBox |  | This delegate control will be using to override Search box |
| QuickLaunchDataSource |  | To load the custom quick launch data source |
| TreeViewAndDataSource |  | To load the custom tree view data source |
| AdditionalPageHead | N/A | This will be available inside the <head> tag and helpful to load the custom css / javascript |
Master Page Regions
Next I started to identify the master page regions. This will be helpful to apply our custom branding successfully. You can see the major region in the blow screen shot.
I have captured below the starting tag of each region and it will be helpful us to reposition the regions based on our requirements.
| No | Description | Html Tag |
| 1 | Site Logo | <div id="siteIcon" |
| 2 | Top navigation menu | <SharePoint:AspMenu ID="TopNavigationMenu" |
| 3 | Page Title | <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea" |
| 4 | Title’s Description | <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderPageTitleInTitleArea" |
| 5 | Site Contents in Quick launch menu | <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderQuickLaunchBottom" |
| 6 | Content Area | <div id="contentBox" |
| 7 | Notification message | <div id="notificationArea" |
| 8 | Welcome text | <div id="welcomeMenuBox" |
| 9 | Site Action menu | <SharePoint:SiteActions |
| 10 | Help menu | <span id="ms-help" |
| 11 | Full screen mode | <span id="fullscreenmodebox" |
| 12 | Left navigation bar | <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderLeftNavBar" |
Summary
In my next article, we will see how to apply custom color and fonts by overriding OTB CSS classes.
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