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

The New Menu


You may not have realized this, but since the beginning of this book we've been working with the new DotNetNuke menu, commonly referred to as the DNNMenu. From version 2 of DotNetNuke, the menu called SolPartMenu has been the default. The new menu has been designed to be more efficient and flexible.

Here are some quotes from the core team member Jon Henning, the author of both the old SolPartMenu and the new DNNMenu:

The SolPartMenu is old and carries a lot of baggage with its almost worth 4 years of backwards compatibility. It has been a goal for v2 of the SolPartMenu to abstract all of the common logic not specific to the menu into separate JS files that could be reused by other controls and applications. This is exactly what the ClientAPI is—an abstraction of logic like positioning, DOM access, XML, etc. The script for the menu should contain only the code for the menu, thus making it easier to maintain and enhance. So in essence, the DNNMenu is in a lot of ways the SolPartMenu...