Liam Cleary recently wrote a blog post on how to "Hide the My Settings link" which is part of the welcome menu. Although his solution is perfectly valid and probably quicker and easier than the alternative solution that I offer - It did have some issues.
Firstly he edited the welcome.ascx user control. Like editing an application page this will affect all sites for that instance of SharePoint.
Secondly this only covers the scenario where the user actually clicks on the "My Settings" link. There are many other access points to the User Information page. For example any list edit/display form will have a link to the page. Thats any instance where you see the following audit info:
So creating a custom "My Settings" link only covers half the problem.
The question then is - how to create a solution that doesn't involve editing shared resources and covers every possible link scenario??
The answer lies in the userdisp.aspx page. In the AdditionalPageHead placehoder tag you will find the following control declaration:
<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" id="DelctlProfileRedirection" ControlId="ProfileRedirection" Scope="Farm" />
What we need to do is create a user control, that redirects the user to a custom page. The user control will the be activated via a feature.
Brief Steps:
- Create a custom user display page and place it in the LAYOUTS directory.
- Create a new User Control that has code to redirect the user to your custom page.
- Create a feature for the delegate control. This feature will cause your custom control to run in place of the SharePoint:DelegateControl declaration. The feature should be scoped to "farm".
I have kept the steps very brief as I have a sample solution with all the necassary code in it.
Download the sample code from here:
http://zac.provoke.co.nz/Samples/CustomUserProfile.zip
To run the sample, copy CustomUserProfile.wsp file and Deploy.cmd to your WSS server and run the following command from a prompt:
deploy.cmd http://yoursitenamehere
Once the feature is activated, navigating to My Settings page will redirect the user to userprofile.aspx.
Not a very useful custom profile page, but thats what part 3 is for :)
The only problem now is that the feature's scope is set to farm, so the user control will be run for all sites. To solve this you can create a second feature, and then before redirecting check for the features existance. This is also included in the sample solution.
Part 3 will show how to easily customise the actual User Profile page.
For more info on delegate controls have a look at the following resources:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms470880.aspx
http://sharepointnutsandbolts.blogspot.com/2007/06/using-delegate-control.html