Applies To: SharePoint 2010

While testing our new master page that replaces the minimal.master I noticed that depending on your permission level, things were rendering differently. If you had full permissions then things looked great, but if you were a visitor with read-only permissions things were a little off.

Taking a look at the actual page source we found that the stylesheet links in the header section looked different. With Full permissions the link to corev4.css existed, but didn’t for anyone else. Obviously permission to the corev4.css file wasn’t the issue since this was working fine on all other sites regardless of user permissions.

Some quick searching and experimentation revealed that the corev4.css link was only added to the page when the Site Actions menu was set to render. For the standard minimal.master file this is fine, but if you are depending on any of the corev4.css styles, you’ve got a problem. Fortunately, the solution is simple.

In your custom minimal.master master page find this section in the head element:

 <SharePoint:CssLink runat="server" Alternate="true"/>
 <SharePoint:Theme runat="server"/>
 <SharePoint:CssRegistration Name="minimalv4.css" runat="server"/>
 <SharePoint:CssRegistration Name="layouts.css" runat="server"/>

And add a CssRegistration element to corev4.css above the minimalv4.css CssRegistration:

 <SharePoint:CssLink runat="server" Alternate="true"/>
 <SharePoint:Theme runat="server"/>
 <SharePoint:CssRegistration Name="corev4.css" runat="server"/>
 <SharePoint:CssRegistration Name="minimalv4.css" runat="server"/>
 <SharePoint:CssRegistration Name="layouts.css" runat="server"/>

That’ll do it. The corev4.css will load regardless of the presence of the Site Actions menu and there aren’t any conflicts since SharePoint ensures it isn’t registered twice.