AWG Blogs

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Master Pages in Subsites

You may get "The system master page setting currently applied to this site is invalid. Please select a new master page and apply it" in _layouts/ChangeSiteMasterPage.aspx, when having set a subsite of a site collection (with publishing infrastructure enabled) to use a master page within the subsite relative _catalogs/masterpage/ folder. It appears MOSS 2007 publishing infrastructure does not fully support subsites utilizing master pages from subsite master page galleries, hence the error.


To avoid this error, ensure that every subsite in a site collection with Publishing Infrastructure enabled is using a master page that resides in the master page gallery of the root site.

Ironically, doing so however, causes another error in SharePoint Designer "The URL ../../_catalogs/masterpage is invalid" when editing the subsite in SPD. Therefore, it appears that editing subsites in site collections, that have Publishing Infrastructure enabled, in SPD is not supported.