Usefull forms in the Layouts directory

It's been a while since I last posted here. Almost 2,5 years have passed since my last post. I've still been doing SharePoint, I just never got around to blogging about it. I'll try to post more in the coming months, so check back for updates.


To kick things of, I have a little tip that can be very useful to site administrators. SharePoint has a lot of forms for managing the site. These are located in the 14 hive's layouts directory (C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS).

Some of these are available through the site settings menu. Others are only seen when SharePoint redirects you to them. Most of these however, are also available by just browsing to them. I'll discuss 2 examples, but many more usefull forms are available.

WARNING
The forms mentioned in this page are hidden for a reason. Some of these may not work in all circumstances. Others, such as the 'Save site as template' let you perform actions that are not officially supported. Always use common sense when using these things and try the effects in a development or testing environment if at all possible.
/WARNING


In site without publishing features you cannot change the masterpage. As you can see here, there is no 'Masterpage' link:



Most of us SharePoint-devers are pretty codeminded, and will choose to just change the masterpage through code, or in our site/web template. However the form is still available:




All you need to do is browse to the /_layouts/ChangeMasterPage.aspx page.


A second example is the PermSetup.aspx page. This is the page you get when you choose to use unique permissions for your site. It allows you to manually set the associated member and owner groups for your site. This screen is quite important, because it is the only chance you have for setting the association through the UI. However, the only time you get there is at site creation. Unless you just browse to the /_layouts/PermSetup.aspx page:




Hope these two will save you the trouble of writing custom code.

Small update, the link to save your site as a template isn't shown when publishing is enabled. This doesn't mean it's gone:
/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx