Hi. Great resource here. I have been developing websites for about 4 years and am brand new to DNN (about 4 days) and .NET (0 days!). I have the basics of skinning and containers down, but I already ran into something that I would like to do that it appears DNN can't do out of the box (unless I'm missing something).

Our site has several sections. Each section has the same basic layout but a different header (links and graphics). I know that I can do a couple of things to make this work like create a skin for each section and make the user pick the skin for every single page. Or I can make each section its own portal and assign the section skin to that portal.

I'm not a fan of either of those 2 approaches because 1.) it forces me to create way too many skins and as the site grows would be a headache to maintain and 2.) it forces the user to pick a skin for every single page. If you have any experience content management you know that handing over that kind of power to a client can cause things to fall apart quickly.

So, what I want to do is introduce some logic into the skin that says 'if the top level section of this page is X, show header Y'. Here is a sample site structure:

Home
Events
   - sub page
      - sub sub page
      - sub sub page
   -sub page
Students
   - sub page
      - sub sub page
      - sub sub page
   -sub page
Children
   - sub page
      - sub sub page
      - sub sub page
   -sub page

In this site structure Home, Events, Students, and Children are the sections I'm interested in. I want my skin to determine which section a page is in and apply the header to every page and sub page under it based on that determination. I think what I am after is a Skin Object but I'm not sure about that since I am still learning the architecture and terminology of DNN.

Sorry for the long post. Does this make sense and is it possible? Is there a different/better way to go about this?

Thanks!
-Dan

If I were doing this, I'd implement the headers and footers using Text/HTML modules. DotNetNuke has the concept of showing a particular module on "all pages" but you can then selectively remove a module from some pages. I understand that you want to show a module on a subset of pages. You might do this by applying all of your header and footers to all pages, and then selectively remove the ones you don't want on a page. If you set this up with only the parent pages, then you would create new pages by copying from the appropriate parent page.

Since I haven't done this, you might want to test this out first.

I'm just free-associating here but ... you might be able to use module header and footer html to control display on a particular page. John Mitchell's snapsis.com forums for DotNetNuke offers some tips and tricks for putting conditional content on pages. You might look there.

Still, I'd think that the simplest approach would be best ...

For sharing content from text / html modules across the site, I create a page called shadows which only admin can view. - To this page I add all the text / html modules that I wish to use the copy funtion with for the entire site. - I then use the 'add existing module' in the control panel and add one of the modules from the shadow page.

This makes it easier to keep track of all your copied modules and you can then also edit them all from one page.

Thanks for the tips. The shadow page is a good idea. I've actually already considered the sharing of text/html modules across pages but 2 issues are keeping me from going that route.

1. We are handing content management over to the client. We don't want to add the extra step of making them select their own header because a.) it is an extra step and b.) it will be too easy for them to create chaos in their site by choosing the wrong headers.

2. I need to embed skin objects like login links, menus, etc. in these headers. As far as I'm aware you can't do that in text/html modules, only directly in the skin. (I could be wrong about that. Please correct me if I am.)

You are correct. You cannot put skin objects into the header of a Text/HTML module. You can, though, put most HTML in those headers.