Hi

I have a simple question. But something very important in the art of programming skins.

Hope someone can help with this or point to an article with a clear discription of this.

My question is; How do you specify the correct path to image sources in ascx skins.

This so it works in all staging scenarios, ie. when im developing the site url is http://localhost/testsitename, when staging to testbed its http://ipadress/testsitename and finally in production the portal is reached at http://www.somedomainname.xx

This without having to change anything in the skin files when moving the skin and sites from the different stages

The question goes for hardcoded internal page links ( tags).

Hope for some expert help on this one.

Best regards

Peter Meldgaard

Hello,

Check out the code supplied in this tutorial:
DotNetNuke ASCX Skinning for Professional Skinners

If you look in the DNNC_Layouts folder you will see that we place all images in a img folder inside the skin.

In the ascx file skin code we then use: (spaces added so that it displays in the forum)

< img src="< % =SkinPath % >img/mylogo.jpg" / >



and if you want to reference an image in the skin.css use:

background:#b0d1f3 url(img/header_grad.jpg) top left repeat-x;



As long as the images are placed inside your skin folder the reference paths will work no matter where you install the skin

Hi Lee

 

Thank u for the VERY fast reply. and ok, ill use the inline coding method as you suggest. thank you so much.

But what about hardcoded links, like toplogo that links to homepage.

Or Frontpage image link that links to a page with company info etc.

 

How should i specify the path to does pages so it will work on all deployment stages?

 

Best regards

 

Peter Meldgaard    

Hello,

I try to avoid hardcoding any links into the skin, for an image that you wish to link to the homepage you could use < a href="/" - this will link to the root of your domain name - so it will not work for localhost or if you are using the skin on multiple portals. If this is an issue, use the [LOGO] token which will work fine in all areas.

Frontpage image link - I would make this area a contentpane, you can then add a text / html module to it and add the image in there. You can then use relative linking to the image, or if you find you need to reset the link to the image when the skin is moved to a different server, you can edit the text / html module quickly rather than having to make edits on the skin.