Thanks for creating a wonderful website with so much useful information. Although an experienced .NET developer, I'm new to DotNetNuke and find your video series a useful way of getting up to speed quickly. So much easier than wading through books, and you dont have to wait for them to arrive by post.

Since joining, I've been following 'How to Build a Website in DotNetNuke' and learning lots. It was trouble-free up until Part 6 - How to Create a Skin for DotNetNuke and video 4 - Creating a skin.xml file and setting the menu to display vertically.

Part of the problem is that I downloaded the latest version (as you do) from the dotnetnuke website - 4.8.2 - and they've made a few changes since your video was produced.

In particular, the so-called SolPart menu ('[MENU]' token) seems to have been replaced by the DNNMenu system ('[NAV' token) and your instructions for how to change the DNN-blue menu you take as a template in the VortexMusic project from vertical orientation to horizontal by editing the skin.xml file dont seem to work anymore (I think?). I've been trying to pick up the thread again - trying to find out how the NAV menu works and how to change its orientation - for a couple of days now and find it hard to find intelligable information about this new menu system on the web.

I'll probably crack it eventually, but if you are able to point me in the right direction I would be most grateful.

And I would suggest that a tutorial on the NAV menu and its differences from the SolPart menu - e.g. the differences in structure of the skin.xml file - would be very useful to newcomers to DotNetNuke. If you have already provided this somewhere on this site, or know of a good description of this elsewhere, I'd be grateful if you could point it out to me.

Many thanks,

Steve Taylor

Yes, SOLPART Menu has been superceded by the Nav menu. I must admit that I don't have a lot of experience with this, but I was under the impression (mis-impression?) that it was configured much like SOLPART.

I've had a lot of success with the Snapsis Nav Menu (a special offer for this one is located in our forums). I was able to do some things with it that I had trouble doing with SOLPART. Lee's got some tutorials on the House menu.

I hope that someone will tell both of us where to find information on the DotNetNuke menu.

Hello,

Glad to hear the tutorials are useful, to be honest I have not experimented that much with NAV, I tend to opt for HouseMenu or the Snapsis menu - but I will do some research and put together a tutorial, thanks,

Lee

Thank you to Joe and Lee for replying with advice.

Since my original posting I've been persevering with the NAV menu and have learned a lot more about it. I finally managed to complete the 'Creating a Skin' part of the 'Building a Website' tutorial series, and I thought I'd post my findings here in case it helps someone else who may be struggling.

Of course, I'm still quite new to DotNetNuke so apologies if I've misunderstood something, or if there is a better way to achieve the desired result, unknown to me. Anyway, here are some thoughts...

1. It's possible to change the ProviderName in skin.xml - when I copied this from the DNN 4.8.2 DNN-Blue skin into the VortexMusic project (following Lee's tutorial) the ProviderName was set to 'DNNMenuNavigationProvider'. However, if you study the DotNetNuke Navigation WebControls
document (follow the 'Documents' link on http://webcontrols.dotnetnuke.com/DNNMenu.aspx) and scroll down to the table that begins around page 13 (actual page 17 in the pdf) and find the final 4 columns of ticks; the first column applies to 'SolpartMenuNavigationProvider' and the second column to 'DNNMenuNavigationProvider'. So out of curiosity I tried changing the ProviderName in skin.xml to SolpartMenuNavigationProvider and, after installing the skin, the menus seem to work but to be formatted differently - presumably as the Solpart Menu, though I have no knowledge yet of the way that this works. Being keen to get the NAV menu to work, I didn't explore this option further.

2. Its worth also noting that (on the second page of the above table), the CSSContainerRoot does not seem to be supported (no tick) for the DNNMenuNavigationProvider (as is also the case for CSSBreak), so you might as well comment out the corresponding styles (main_dnnmenu_container and main_dnnmenu_break respectively) in skin.css if you are using the DNNMenuNavigationProvider. I did verify that the CSSContainerRoot style was picked up when I changed the provider to the SolPart option, which seems to bear out the information in the document. As a result of the CSSContainerRoot not being available with the NAV menu, I had to apply the 'gradient_menu_vertical.jpg' background-image and associated styles to the .menupane style instead of the container style as suggested in Lee's tutorial video.

3. I could not find a way to limit the height of the menu container to 100px using styles alone. I resorted to creating a table within the leftpane TD element (menupane in the tutorial) and setting its TR height to 100. This seemed to work successfully. I placed a TD element within this TR and gave it the menupane style. The [NAV] token was placed as text in this TD element.

4. Put styles for the main menu text items under the .main_dnnmenu_rootitem style, for sub-menu items under main_dnnmenu_item and put styles for mouseover events under the .main_dnnmenu_itemhover style.

5. Where Lee's tutorial mentions SkinItem styles for the SolPart menu, substitute the word 'SkinObject' for 'SkinItem' when using the NAV menu.

I think this covers most of the differences. Apologies of I've missed anything out.

Now I'll have a go at learning about Containers...

Cheers,

Steve

Sorry, I forgot to include information about how to change the NAV menu orientation, which was the basis of my original posting.

Here is a link which explains how its done:

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community...fault.aspx

See also the following forum postings elsewhere on this site:

http://www.dnncreative.com/Forum/ta...fault.aspx

Regards,

Steve

Thank you for the information, Steve!

Thanks for the info, just to follow up, no.1 - yes this is the setting to use the Solpartmenu instead of Nav menu, so you could set this option and apply the stylings in the tutorial. - I did a quick test and could install the skin zip included with the code in the vortex skin to DNN v4.8.x and it displays correctly.

I will be looking at the Nav menu for a tutorial and will put together further info for everyone, thanks,