Add any comments or questions regarding the How to build Skins for DNN 6.xTutorial

Thank you for this well explained tutorial. When will Videos 2-13 be made available?

Yes I would like to know this as well home long till the rest of the videos are released. We have several skins we have done but they all act differently depending on the version of DNN 6 they are in and if they are an upgraded version or not.

so 5.9.3 upgraded to 6
acts different to a fresh dnn 6 install
which acts different again to a dnn 6 upgraded to 6.0.1
and 6.0.1 fresh install just goes crazy with all the manage buttons at the top of the page. And all the panes overlaping.

Thanks

Sorry I said home when I meant how. Sorry long few days with this skinning issue.

thanks
Paul

If the same skin looks/behaves differently in different installs of DotNetNuke, you need to look at what might be different between the two installs.

I think that this points to the portal.css and the _default.css files.

For starters, you could copy these files from one install to the other and see if that brings the two skin behaviors together.

There are some major changes in the _default.css file for Version 6. They involve a lot of cleaning up of the file, so you may have been caught by that. The portal.css file is unique to a portal. But, if you do a "clean install" of DotNetNuke, it gets a lot of styles for the demo site template that is installed. Assuming that you haven't added to portal.css but have deleted all of the content from the demo site, you should also clean out the portal.css file to get rid of those styles.

Styles that affect the skin should all be in skin.css. You may need to redefine styles in there that are defined in _default.css if you need to change them.

You should also look at the way that the skin file and skin.css are constructed for the minimal extropy skin and make sure that you've handled the control panel and action menu items correctly.

Thanks Joseph Did not even think about the default and portal css files. I have been going in and editing them but did not think about them being different in different installs.
If I copy everything out of the portal css into the dark knight skin then that skin should still work should it not and then I am free to do whatever with my skin. Without the portal interfering.

Does anyone know what all this stuff does in the Default.css as I looked at a 5.6.3 site I have and the default.css is well laid out and easy to read and follow as it is documented within the css. this new one in 6 is a mass of lines that is hard to follow.
Is there a reason no one cleaned it up before release.

Anyway thanks again
Paul

Thanks for taking the time to make these videos guys. I myself was in a rush to create a css skin for DNN 6 for several projects so I have taken the Dark Knight skin and adapted it for my needs. If anyone wants to have a look I will be uploading it to our new hosting, domains and websites website today. The current one is table based.
The site is http://www.palatineweb.com

And if anyone wants any help or advice on the skinning I think I have a good grasp of it now. So drop a message here.
Always happy to help fellow nukers if I can.

Thanks
Paul

I have viewed Video 1, and the rest of the series looks to be very very informative as well. Any tentative schedules for their release?
Thanks.

Any idea when the remaining videos will be released?

Hi everyone, we plan to release two of these videos a week, so the next two will be out tomorrow.

Videos 3 and 4 will be combined into one, so you'll actually be getting three vids tomorrow.

Hope you find them useful.

Andy

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Great Tutorial! Do you know of any other resources on styling the DDR menu so I can go ahead and work on that?

The DotNetNuke Wiki at DotNetNuke.com has a fair amount of detail.

These tutorials:

DotNetNuke ASCX Skinning for Professional Skinners
DotNetNuke Nav Menu
How to Package a Skin for DotNetNuke 5
Nav Menu v2 for DotNetNuke v5
Skin Object Tokens for DotNetNuke 5
Super Stylesheets Skinning in DotNetNuke 5 - DNN Layouts


touch on many of the issues. Not specifically the DDR menu, but the parts on styling the Nav menu are quite applicable.

One thing: for most uses, you will want to use one of the pre-built themes and style from there. So, what I like to do is examine the page source to see how the menu is "rendered" and it's fairly easy to identify the Ids and classes for the various objects.

Thanks Joe!

There is this one to (should still be applicable):

DNN Garden - DDR Menu for DotNetNuke

Videos 10,11,12,13 missing from how to convert psd to skin tutorial. Where can I find those videos?

The tutorials in this series are being released at the rate of 2 per week. Look for 10 and 11 next Thursday and the final two the week after.

This tutorial has been amazing so far. I just finished video 11.
I initially created this post because I had a problem after video 10, but I ran through everything again and figured it out.

Thanks DDNCreative.

Great videos!

If i was to add some further topis they would be (although I haven't seen videos 10 onwards so sorry if you have covered them)

Tuning for Mobile Devices
Tuning for download speed
Can skin objects contain actual code logic which can conditionally show things?

Thanks
John

DotNetNuke 6.1, now in beta and which you can download and test, has a number of new feature specifically aimed at detecting mobile and other browser capabilities. Look at the blogs section at DotNetNuke for some recent information.

Also, look at the recent blogs by Will Strohl and Chris Hammond that deal with related issues.

Skin Objects ARE code, so you can do lots there.

Skins can have conditional code built in. Skins can also have "codebehind" files that execute code when the skin is loaded.

You may want to check the 40Fingers StyleHelper skin object at 40fingers.net.

As for speed, DotNetNuke 6.x is demonstrably faster than earlier versions mainly to having paid attention to download speed issues. The resources mentioned above provide more information. I think that Joe Brinkman has blogged about this in the last month or so.