Hello,

I'm a DNN noob and a rusty developer, but I'm trying to work my way thru.  I used Lee's excellent installation article and free CSS skin package (Andreas 09) to get everything up and running using the HouseOfNuke HouseMenu skin object.  I installed the template file also, and everything seems to work fine under my 4.7.0 DNN installation.

I'm trying to recreate the standard solpart menu functionality with the horizontal menu bar and dropdown submenus, but with using the pure CSS model of this skin.  I've played around with changing the skin.xml values including: IsRecursive=True, Orientation=H, Mode=D.  None of this seems to have any effect. (Note: I have not attempted to remove the solpart menu if that has anything to do with it)

I've tried striping things down, and borrowing bits of CSS and XML code from the HouseofNuke.com main menu, as well as one of Tom's sites at writergear.com just to see if I can get a dynamic menu working at all.

I'm stumped right now!  Does anybody have tips on getting dynamic menus working with this particular skin package?  Your help is very much appreciated.

Thanks!
Andy

Hi Andy,

If you want to create a pure dynamic CSS menu, I would suggest you look at the Snapsis CSS menu. - I have recently been working with this menu on a client's project and successfully implemented a dynamic CSS menu.

I have not attempted dynamic menus with the house menu as when I originally tested it (quite a while ago and now) IE7 had display issues (this could have been due to my CSS programming rather than the menu itself)

If you are interested in Snapsis menu - there is a 35% discount available for subscribers of this site

- NOTE: - it is not easy setting up dynamic CSS menus, make sure you test your menu in all browsers...

if a pure CSS menu is not essential, you could also look at the SolPart Menu and integrate that instead of the house menu.

Lee,
Good article, visually I'm there but using XHTML strict and I'm down to just 3 errors, all related to (Also using DNN 4.7):
document type does not allow element "input" here; missing one of "p", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "div", "pre", "address", "fieldset", "ins", "del" start-tag.
and they are all due to three hidden inputs that are not contained in a form element.
Where do I go to fix this?

Incidentally, there is no option to set XHTML 1.0 in VS. It's either transitional or XHTML 1.1
Is this a glaring misunderstanding of standards by Microsoft (what again!) or some kind of joke?

I was catching up with previous tutorials of yours and note that from the time you started fixing code errors, many of them carry forward into next versions of DNN. Surely this should not happen with a development community such as yours? (This will save you having to create more videos for future versions to cover the same ground and we having to listen to them, and keep making the same changes. Nobody wins!).

It also looks like it's going to be a long struggle to get all developers to tow the line regarding standards. Perhaps you need to send out a warning order that the next major version of DNN (maybe 5.0) will only accept code that renders compliant XHTML 1.0 and only uses CSS for presentation. Why not go all the way and state that all JavaScript and Ajax must be unobtrusive (behavior only from external file applied to elements exactly like CSS). I do this now so its not rocket science.
This quality check would really push DNN to the top of the CMS world.

Any way, I really appreciate your efforts which is moving in the same direction that I'm suggesting.

Keep up the good work.

Bill

Hi Bill,

I don't know how you willl fix those errors, I've only taken the level of validation to XHTML transitional. - if you find a solution let us know.

Yes, quite a few of the code changes from the previous tutorials still need applying to DotNetNuke. - unfortunately I cannot do anything about this as I am not a DotNetNuke core team member - I do not have any influence to get those code changes applied to DotNetNuke.

Having said this, I did give Cathal Connelly from the core team access to the XHTML tutorials, and he has applied some of those changes to DotNetNuke, ie. the default.aspx file.

From the open force conference I did learn that the DotNetNuke core team intends to enable XHTML compliance in version 5, so hopefully we should not need to make those changes in the future.

Yes it will probably take a while for developers to adopt XHTML compliance, hopefully once DotNetNuke becomes compliant, this will become more of a requirement for module developers.

We are going to start reintroducing module reviews on DNN Creative, and one of the elements that we will be checking is XHTML compliance, so at least this may begin to influence some of the developers.

Thanks,

John Mitchell (Mr. Snapsis.com) maker of the Snapsis menu and PageBlaster has a site with the front page xhtml strict. Note: The rest of the site is non-compliant.

He accomplished this using PageBlaster ($49). I have used this tool to make my site www.AgingSafely.com mostly xhtml transitional. Beside speedng up you DNN installation greatly by caching whole pages PageBlaster is a regular expression replacement engine.

You can write a regex rule to replace < img  with < img alt="" or what ever is required.

PageBlaster is a Swiss Army Knife with twelve razor blades. In the right hand you can do fine surgery. In the wrong hand you may become one-handed.

PB comes with the rules that John uses for his site. Not all worked for me. It was a good starting point, which is what he intended it to be.

It was relativly easy to "lower tags, close tags, fix hr & br, nowrap, fix t css and script type statements, fix img statements and deal with some other minor hacks.

I haven't been able to force "quoting attributes", l"ower all attributes" etc.

John's rules for these broke the world on my system. I have a lot of regex experience from the Unix world and Perl and I have yet to get these rules so that it doesn't kill DNN somewhere when I enable it on the whole portal.

Going in and fixing the DNN source code is the other option. Some of it is easy and others places are very hard. Unlike Unix open source projects making DNN isn't a simple "make clean, make all, make install" after you have edited a few lines of code. If you are asp-person then this may be the way to go.

Good luck,
/DaveS