title: Proper way to hide place holders in a SharePoint 2007 Master Page?
body: <p>I am working on a specialized instance of MOSS for a client where What I am wanting to do is hide elements on the master page. In particular, I want to hide the main top navigation bar, the search functionality and the label that shows up in the upper-left-hand corner that tells you the name of the site you are on. So I made a copy of the default.master, and then in SP Designer I set the visible attributes for the placeholders for these blocks to “false” in the new master file. </p>
  
  <p>I can then assign the master to my normal site collection no problems and it seems to been working like I want it to. But when I go to look at the system pages (i.e. any of the forms or backend stuff), it is still using the old default master. And when I tried to set the System Master Page to my customized master file, my MOSS instance threw a File Not Found error. Then certain parts of the admin area just started failing in that same way (i.e. I would try to go into Site Settings -> Content and Structure and it also would throw a File Not Found error) Then at one point, the whole Site Collection would throw “Unknown Error” and there didn't seem to be a way to recover, short of reverting the state of the VM I am running MOSS in for development purposes.</p>
  
  <p>So I am curious, what is the best way to create a custom master page and then hide elements on that page? I realized that my web cluster didn’t have the proper flag set up to actually show me real ASP error messages, so I am going to change that tonight when I get home and see what SP is really telling me about all of this. I have also read that changing the application.master file is not recommended, but I figured I could get away with making a custom page for the Site and System master pages and not worry about application.master.  I have been reading a bunch of Heather Solomon articles as well as various other things. They all basically say that it’s ok to hide elements on a master page, but not delete them outright as SP will break if you do that. Would it be advisable to use a JS/CSS hack to manually hide elements that way, rather than actually making a new master page?</p>