Book Image

DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial

By : Darren Neese
Book Image

DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial

By: Darren Neese

Overview of this book

<p>DotNetNuke is an open-source web application framework written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. The application's content management system is extensible and customizable through the use of skins and modules, and it can be used to create, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and websites.<br /><br />DotNetNuke has a skinning architecture, which provides a clear separation between design and content, enabling a web designer to develop skins without requiring any specialist knowledge of development in ASP.NET; only knowledge of HTML and an understanding of how to prepare and package the skins themselves are required.<br /><br />If you want to create great-looking skins for your DotNetNuke websites, this book is for you. If you're new to DotNetNuke skinning, this book is the ideal introduction. It will give you clear, concise and practical guidance to take you from the basics of DotNetNuke skinning right through to developing the skills to make you a DotNetNuke skinner to be reckoned with!<br /><br />This book gives you step-by-step instructions to the fundamentals of skinning so that you will be in control of the look and feel of your DotNetNuke site, and dreaming of new ideas for creating more interactive user interfaces.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

What is There to Do with Skin Objects


Up to this point, we already know how to add skin objects to our skin. We've been adding the skin object tokens from Chapter 2. However, what we have not been able to do from the beginning is to customize these skin objects.

When our skin is parsed by DotNetNuke, it finds our tokens and compares them to a database table in its database to match them up with ASP.NET user controls (think of the packaged functionality). It then creates our skin as an ASCX file (which technically is another ASP.NET user control) and refers to the other ASCX files that are the skin objects. Let's see what this looks like:

  1. 1. In VWD, find your FirstSkin directory. You should see the HTM and the CSS file. We need to open the ASCX file. If you don't see the ASCX file, you need to refresh the directory by right-clicking on the FirstSkin folder and selecting Refresh Folder. Open the Skin.ascx file.

  2. 2. At the top of the ASCX file you will notice ASP.NET Register tags. Notice the...