DotNetNuke is an open source framework built on top of the
ASP.Net platform. While this system offers an impressive set of
out-of-the-box features for public and private sites, it also
includes a compelling story for folks who want to present a unique
look and feel to visitors.
The skinning engine inside of DotNetNuke has strengthened over
the course of several years and hundreds of thousands of registered
users. The success of its skin and module developer community is
another key indicator of the depth and breadth of this technology.
The Core Team responsible for the DotNetNuke brand has gone to
great lengths to enable a predictable and positive experience for
both the visitors of the site and the developers who build
them.
This book takes you through the process of designing a skin for
a site. It describes a variety of techniques you can use in your
HTML and CSS development as well as coding a few JavaScript,
VB.Net, and C# statements. By the final chapter, you will be well
versed in the installation, configuration, and customization of a
DotNetNuke website.
The practical website design techniques described herein provide
you with a modern, agile architecture that embraces the features in
DotNetNuke and the flexibility of CSS. As a good steward of
standards-based development, the author shows you how to work
toward a DotNetNuke solution that successfully passes an HTML
validation test. The interactive portions of this book examine how
to add personalization, AJAX, Silverlight, and sIFR technology to
extend your site.
When you finish this book, you'll have a good idea of your next
pursuit. You might choose to stay close to the presentation layer
and dive deep into CSS and standards-based web development.
Alternatively, this book might have whetted your appetite for
DotNetNuke module development, or something in-between including
JavaScript, AJAX, or Silverlight technology.
The primary audience for this book includes people interested in
customizing the look and feel of a DotNetNuke website. Skinning is
approachable by developers with a software engineering background
as well as HTML and CSS specialists.
Although DotNetNuke expects a Microsoft SQL Server database by
default, it's not necessary to have any background in database
technology. This book walks you through the database configuration
process and quickly moves on to the core focus of the book.
Readers with a little background in website development,
regardless of platform, will feel at home here. This book is
targeted at showing how to apply web design features to a
DotNetNuke site as opposed to teaching individual web development
skills like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. If you have a basic idea of
where these technologies fit into the overall spectrum of a
website, you'll be able to follow the context of the discussion
with ease.
This book covers how to create a custom skin for DotNetNuke. As
part and parcel of this process, it discusses the steps to install,
configure, and construct a website for a specific group of users.
The skin helps invoke the appropriate look and feel of the site and
augments the content. It shows a variety of angles to address this
challenge and presents several related technologies including CSS,
Silverlight, AJAX, and sIFR that can be used to inspire the right
mood for your particular site.
DotNetNuke is under active development and this book focuses on
version 4.X of the framework. The skinning development features
presented herein are interoperable with all 4.X versions, unless
otherwise specified. For example, the chapter on Microsoft ASP.Net
AJAX recommends version 4.5.5 or higher.
This book contains three sections. The first section levels the
field and addresses some basic terminology in DotNetNuke skinning.
The second section applies the skills of a skin developer to a
specific website. The final section explores a few vertical
segments that transcend DotNetNuke and offer opportunities for
specialized skills in their own right.
Chapters 1 through 5 get you familiar with installing the system
using a variety of techniques and getting acclimated with the files
that make up a DotNetNuke skin.
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Chapter 1, "Introducing DotNetNuke Skinning":
In the first chapter, you receive a broad overview of DotNetNuke
and learn some key concepts including skins, containers, modules,
and panes. If you're new to this open source platform, then this
chapter is essential to your success in using the system.
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Chapter 2, "Installing DotNetNuke": In this
chapter, you learn how to get started on the right foot by
installing the system through a variety of techniques. DotNetNuke
is built on ASP.Net and there are several ways to work with it
including IIS, Cassini, Visual Web Developer, and our old friend,
Notepad.
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Chapter 3, "Installing Skin Packages": Chapter
3 starts at the end and shows you how to apply a new skin package
to a DotNetNuke site as well as examines the individual parts of a
skin package.
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Chapter 4, "Exploring Skins": After you
complete a skin package installation in Chapter 3, you explore the
essential parts of a skin file. Chapter 4 discusses the essentials
of using panes, skin objects, and containers to augment DotNetNuke
modules.
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Chapter 5, "Creating Custom Skins": Chapter 5
expands on the foundation established in the previous chapter by
constructing a custom skin through an HTML file as well as an
ASP.Net web user control. The author also recommends a couple of
tools for developing skins that will help provide some visibility
into how the browser renders the page.
Chapters 6 through 9 present an opportunity to apply the skills
you started to develop in Part I. You'll build a DotNetNuke website
for a neighborhood association, including an assortment of custom
skins.
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Chapter 6, "The Neighborhood Association
Website": This chapter presents the background and
requirements for the neighborhood association website that you will
design and build. Here, you apply an appropriate configuration as
well as install a set of modules the community will find
useful.
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Chapter 7, "Skinning the Neighborhood Association
Website": Chapter 7 goes to work with the process of
developing a custom skin for the neighborhood association website.
This chapter discusses a process for identifying the number of
distinct skins to build and how to architect them for a variety of
pages.
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Chapter 8, "Designing the Navigation": This
chapter discusses how to switch the menu navigation feature and
apply custom CSS rules to modify the look and feel of the site. As
part of the discussion, it shows how to install a third-party menu
component and work toward a smaller, standards-compliant page.
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Chapter 9, "Leveraging Web User Controls": The
last chapter of Part II shows how to add a little panache to the
neighborhood association website with a personalization feature
that enables the visitor to make small adjustments to how the
website renders in their browser. Web user controls provide an
enormous potential and you don't have to be a hard-core developer
to utilize them in your site.
Chapters 10 through 15 introduce you to a few specialty areas of
DotNetNuke, ASP.Net, and general website development. You learn
about some compelling new technologies as well as how to maintain
consistency in DotNetNuke across several types of browsers.
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Chapter 10, "Exploring Silverlight": This
chapter explores an amazing new client-side feature named
Silverlight. It discusses how to add animation and video to the
DotNetNuke website you built in Part II.
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Chapter 11, "Using Cascading Style Sheets":
Chapter 11 presents the basic information you should understand
about CSS including margins, padding, fonts, backgrounds, and
positioning. CSS skills provide you with an agile and search
engine-friendly website. This chapter shows you how to modify the
various CSS files embedded inside DotNetNuke.
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Chapter 12, "Web Standards and Compliance":
After the fundamentals of CSS are laid out in Chapter 11, it shows
how to work toward a standard-compliant website in DotNetNuke. It
discusses how to swap the menu provider and the HTML Editor
provider, too.
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Chapter 13, "Targeting Modules with CSS":
Chapter 13 takes a pragmatic approach to applying CSS to existing
DotNetNuke modules without modifying the HTML. The last section
builds a web page out of an RSS feed and Extensible Stylesheet
Language or XSL.
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Chapter 14, "Exploring AJAX in DotNetNuke":
This chapter takes a look at another hot Microsoft technology,
ASP.Net AJAX. The chapter starts with a brief background on AJAX
and the DotNetNuke Client API and launches into an example of using
AJAX Control Toolkit inside your DotNetNuke page to build an
interactive game.
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Chapter 15, "Using sIFR with DotNetNuke":
Chapter 15 rounds out the book with a compelling case for replacing
image-text files with a more search engine-friendly component. The
technology known as sIFR converts the targeted HTML text into any
TrueType font at run time through JavaScript running on the
visitor's browser. This feature embraces the work of the copy
editor without adding a burden to the graphic designer.