One of my biggest gripes with SharePoint is the difficulty in branding application or layout pages. These are the pages that no matter how much you tweak your master page, remain blue.
EXAMPLE:
here is my nice branded site
I want to upload a document, so i click upload document and get thrown back to this ugly page:
ouch!
But that is a lot of work if you are going to do it for a large number of pages - it may be plausible if there are half a dozen but in a collaboration portal scenario there are dozens of these pages.
So what are the options currently available....
Customize the files in the Layouts folder
This is actually the recommended approach by MSFT. Its very simple - take a backup and then modify away.
The obvious disadvanatge is when you are hosting more than one site on the same server - the changes affect all sites in your farm. Oh and any service pack/hotifx could overwrite any of your chnages.
Create a custom Layouts folder
This is a little better than the last method. You take a copy of the layouts directory and update IIS to point to the copy. Now all site collections in a single web app will share any modifications which is pretty acceptable. Your files can still be overwritten and you may get some strange behaviour for anything hardcoded to the layouts dir.
SuperBranding
So this definately comes closest to an acceptable solution. Its a
CodePlex project that has been put together by the legendary Ted Pattison. The way it works is by running an HTTP Module that intercepts page requestsa and overrides the preinit method to attach a custom mater page. Now we have full flexibilty and MSFT won't overwrite our customizations.
The upload page with superbranding:
That is a million times better!!!