Articles

Version 2 released May 2006
Version 1 created August 2005

These free video tutorials are for beginners to DotNetNuke. They give you a quick overview of DNN with just enough information to get you going, without becoming lost in the full details.

These videos provides a foundation for getting started with DotNetNuke and will lead onto the other tutorials which provide more detailed explanations.

The DNN Quick Start Guide videos cover:

• How to secure your DotNetNuke portal
• Changing the passwords of the admin and host accounts
• Explanation of the admin edit area, content panes and modules
• Deleting modules from the Home Page
• Inserting two Text / HTML modules to the page
• Using the Text / HTML module to add text and images
• Using the links module, adding links to the page
• How to preview the DotNetNuke website
• Using the image module
• Changing the look of a DotNetNuke portal
• Using Containers: Removing containers
• How to change a container
• How to change the skins for a DotNetNuke portal
• How to change and upload a new logo
• How to add pages
• How to add sub menu and sub sub menu items
• How to move modules around the page

Total Time Length: 40min 17secs

This is part of the How did they build it …? series of interviews.

This is an email interview with Tim O’Brien from O’Brien IT who has created http://www.obrienit.se

This is an interesting website because it uses CSS for the layout of the website, rather than tables. At present, there are not many DotNetNuke websites that use CSS for the layout on commercial websites, so this is a particularly interesting website.

Even more interesting is that this site fully validates to the W3C standards. This is the first DNN site that I have come across that fully validates

This tutorial outlines what not to do when working with the Text/HTML module. We then outline the methods that you should use when adding content to the Text/HTML module.

This is a list of practices we have come across when beginners first use the Text/HTML module which you should try to avoid.

This free video tutorial demonstrates how to install the FCKEditor. This editor can be used to replace the FreeTextBox editor that comes as standard with DotNetNuke.

The FCKEditor is a WYSIWYG text editor that allows you to add text and image content to your modules. The main module that you will use with the FCKEditor is the Text/HTML module.

I personally always replace the FreeTextBox editor with the FCKEditor as I find the FCKEditor to be more stable and reliable than the FreeTextBox editor. - Highly Recommended.

This is a continuation of our series on How to build a DotNetNuke website.

This video tutorial explains the simple steps for removing the default Solpart menu within a container and replacing it with a drop down list.

The main reason we need to remove the Solpart menu is because the Solpart menu is not compatible with a XHTML Transitional Doc Type.

We need to set up DotNetNuke to use a XHTML Doc Type so that we can successfully implement features such as:

• Font-resizing
• Pure CSS layout skins (no tables)

Time Length: 4min 13secs
Download Size: 4.2MB

It’s essential to test your DotNetNuke skin in a variety of configurations to ensure it is error free and compatible with as many browsers as possible.

This tutorial provides some of the key elements and tools that you can use to test your DotNetNuke skins.

Covering:

• Images
• Font Sizes
• Web Developer Tools
• Browser Testing
• Validating Skins
• W3C's Online Tools
• Validating HTML via File Upload
• Validating CSS via File Upload
• Web Developer Tool and Conclusion

Quirks and Standards Compliance modes are the two methods that browsers can use to interpret your CSS. It’s one of the important considerations if you are implementing a pure CSS skin or using font-resizing techniques.

This tutorial covers:

• Quirks and Standards Compliance modes
• Switching modes
• DOC TYPES Document Type Definition (DTD)
• Which XHTML DTD is suitable for DotNetNuke?
• How do we set DotNetNuke to use XHTML 1.0 transitional DTD?
• Pros and Cons

The tutorial also includes a Default.aspx file for you to download so that you can quickly set your DotNetNuke installation to use XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

This tutorial explains XHTML and how to improve your skin and module coding standards by implementing the XHTML rules. It covers:

• Examples
• Why bother with XHTML compliant code? What’s it all about?
• How does this affect DotNetNuke?
• The XHTML standards also need to be adhered to by module developers. Why?

And further resources.

This tutorial is intended for people who are familiar and comfortable with CSS.

We look at some of the techniques that are available within CSS to minimise the size of our CSS stylesheets and to write more efficient code.

In particular focusing on:

CSS Shorthand
Grouping Classes
Colour Shorthand

– This is a good performance enhancement for any DotNetNuke skin.

This is part of the How did they build it …? series of interviews.

This is an email interview with Laurence Neville who has created two DotNetNuke sites: www.landmarkeducation.co.il and www.landmarkeducation.co.jp

We discuss how Laurence created these websites, in particular looking at the use of Languages within the sites. This raises some interesting issues, such as setting the text to display from right to left.