MOSS: On Skinning SharePoint

Leon/fallenRogue has a lengthy blog post debunking some criticism on the difficulty of skinning SharePoint, and offers some good tips, one of which is below:

In order to make the application (/_layouts/) pages that are part of your SharePoint solution share the same look and feel as the rest of your custom pages:

“...craft a simple SharePoint Solution that installs an HttpModule to the Farm. This module will determine if the currently requested page is a: coming from layouts and b: from a site that has your feature for the admin master swap enabled. If it does… then in 1 line of glorious C# you can swap the master page to one of your choosing. The best part? It scales, it’s managed cleanly through admin sections and is future proof (or at least future compatible).”

http://www.fallenrogue.com/articles/252-SharePoint-2007-Pointedly-Mistaken