Book Image

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

1 (1)
Book Image

Building Websites with the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit

1 (1)

Overview of this book

Microsoft's ASP.NET Community Starter Kit (CSK) is a powerful, freely available application that allows you to quickly create a fully featured community-driven website, complete with article and news management, downloads, forums, and user handling. Supported and tested by thousands of developers in the ASP.NET community across the world, the Community Starter Kit offers you the luxury of a scalable and extensible architecture, and the ability to brand your own site. This book will take you inside the Community Starter Kit, allowing you to harness its power for easily creating your own websites. The book is structured to help you understand, implement and extend the Community Starter Kit: Understand how the Community Starter Kit works. Build the skills to implement your own site. Develop the confidence to extend the system for your own needs. With this book, you will learn how to: Install and configure the CSK Find your way around the CSKs towering range of features Create and administer community websites Become familiar with the common CSK ASP.NET controls Customize your CSK site Discover the secrets of the CSK core architecture Explore the inner workings of CSK modules Extend the CSK by creating new modules Customize existing modules with Web controls Add an RSS feed to share your content with others Deploy your CSK website This book is for ASP.NET developers with a sound grasp of C# and access to Visual Studio .NET. This book uses the Visual Studio. NET version of the ASP.NET Community Starter Kit available from http://www.asp.net/StarterKits/
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
TrixBox Made Easy
Credits
About the Authors
Introduction
CSK Controls

Chapter 4. Themes, Skins, and the Common Controls

In this chapter we’ll talk about colors and layout. The colors of a web page are defined by the style being used, and the layout is generated by skin files. The style and the skin together form the theme, which defines the way each community page looks.

Having an appropriate theme is important because it reflects the personality of your community website. The Community Starter Kit (CSK) has been designed from the start to support easy integration of skins and styles, without needing to rebuild the project or change the database.

In this chapter you’ll learn how to build personalized themes. You will:

  • Learn about themes, skins, and styles and how they work

  • Learn about the built-in CSK custom web controls

  • Have your first look with the CSK Visual Studio .NET project (although we’ll not do any programming using C# in this chapter)

This will prepare you for the next chapter where we’ll build a new community website from scratch.

Meeting Themes, Skins...