In the next issue (no. 5), DNN Creative Magazine is going to begin a new series looking at creating a DNN website. Issue 5 in particular will feature skinning.

Alongside the skinning tutorials I am currently arranging an mp3 interview regarding skinning.

I want to give you the opportunity to ask your own questions to the skinning experts.

Please reply to this forum post with any questions regarding skinning and I will include the most relevant questions in the mp3 interview.

Thanks,

Hello. I am new but already have become obsessed with DotNetNuke. I have the concept of skinning down, I believe, and have successfully created my own. Containers is another thing all together. Now is there a simple tutorial that describes from start to finish about creating AND UPLOADING DotNetNuke containers for DNN 4x? Thank you in advance

I think any good tutorial would cover troubleshooting. What are some of the common mistakes made during skinning? What are some of the common error messages encountered when uploading or using a new skin? How are these issues/mistakes overcome?

For the low budget skinner, what HTML editors do you recommend that work for (a) HTML+XML skins, and (b) ASCX skins. In other words, what affordable/free WYSIWYG editor allows you to work on a skin with either tokens or DNN tags in the skin.

The low budget skinner is me (and a lot of other people I bet)! I don't have Dreamweaver, and I have not yet found a good HTML editor for skins - I edit skin files in a test editor directly on the server then refresh to see the results!

I'm using Treeview control and would like to customise it to the look of skin.
Could you please suggest on what would be the easiest way to turn off little icons that
display next to menu and submenu items?

Thank you everyone for your feedback so far. These are good suggestions for tutorials, have a further think about specific questions to ask in an actual interview, here are some questions I have come up with so far:

Planning

Could you outline the process you go through when creating a skin?

Regarding the initial planning of a skin, what are your main considerations?

How to choose colours

How do you choose the colour scheme for a skin?

What are the main considerations when choosing a colour scheme?

Do you have any resources you can pass onto the listeners for choosing colours?

Best working practices

In your opinion, what makes a good skin?

Could you outline your setup when you are creating skins eg. The software you use & how you quickly view the changes you are applying while working on the skin

.ascx or .htm – pros and cons

Working with panes & layout

Tips & Tricks

Thanks,

Thanks for including this. I would appreciate also if you could ask if there are any low budget WYSIWYG editors that your interviewee can recommend. However, even if their advice was that Dreamweaver was the only package they knew, that would be useful - I would know I should through away good old Notepad and haed down to eBay!

Hello,

Have a look at this page: http://www.thefreesite.com/Free_Sof..._freeware/

If you test a few of these programs out I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the best program.

Thanks,

You may also want to check out:

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which is free from microsoft. I'm currently installing it to test it out and if it is suitable I will use this programme to create the skinning tutorials rather than Dreamweaver.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/e...fault.aspx

Thanks for those links. I will try them out.

I was asking about low budget WYSIWYG editors specifically that would work well as skin editors, i.e. they could handle: ASCX files with control registrations at the top, files without or , special tags etc. In other words, editors that wouldn't fall over, mangle, or be unable to display skin files.

The tags in my last post got stripped out - I meant to say this:

I was asking about low budget WYSIWYG editors specifically that would work well as skin editors, i.e. they could handle: ASCX files with control registrations at the top, files without HTML, HEAD or BODY tags, special DNN tags etc. In other words, editors that wouldn't fall over, mangle, or be unable to display skin files.

ok, thanks, yes it is a good point. - Have you had chance to check out any of the free HTML editors from the link I gave you?

Cheers,

Hi Lee,

Just want to know about :
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition which is free from microsoft. I'm currently installing it to test it out and if it is suitable I will use this programme to create the skinning tutorials rather than Dreamweaver

You said you have downloaded and testing it.

Any good !!!!!

Hello,

I haven't tested it yet. - I've downloaded it and installed it on a test machine & I've downloaded several free video tutorials that come with it, but haven't got round to trying to skin with it. - It does look good though. - The only point is that the full install takes up 1.5GB of space.

The reason for the delay in testing is that I was running out of disk space to try on my DNN machine, but yesterday I recieved a 250GB drive so I should have a bit of free space to install it now and test it!

It will be a couple of days as I need to do a couple of video tutorials on how to install a skin & how to apply them before I can get round to testing it and doing the skinning tutorial.

Will let you know soon!

Cheers,

Hi Lee,

Also this Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition avaliable for free is not a BETA edition ....

Thanks for your quick replies. Very happy with the support provided.

Keep it up.

Cheers.

Oh yes, it's fully working and it does look like a fantastic product.

When you install it, you can also select to automatically install SQL Server Express 2005 and it also installs the latest ASP.NET 2.0 framework, so it does take care of a lot of the work for you. - It looks ideal for quickly getting started with creating modules for no cost!

Shaun Walker has posted a few tutorials in the asp.net forums on setting up Visual Web Express Edition for creating modules.

http://forums.asp.net/1114393/ShowPost.aspx

To follow up, Visual Web Developer Express Edition is really good for working with skins. It has a few useful tools for checking errors, which I've found to be really helpful.

I've created a whole series of video tutorials on how to create a skin and how to create a container which will be released in the next few days and I created them using VWD.

(I'm editing the final parts, there were 29 videos at first, will probably be in the region of 10-12 once I have finished editing - approx 60-70mins just on skinning - plus further videos on introduction to skinning, setting up etc. etc. - It's going to be a big issue!)

The tutorials walk you through setting up VWD for skinning so I can highly recommend you download VWD and check it out.

Thanks,

Yeah can you ask Nina how she comes up with some of the design ideas and how they influence her when she's doing work for her clients. I've got a few of them and I'd like to know how I can make my work easier. 

Can you ask her how much you really know about DotNetNuke sites before you can skin properly. I've worked with DNN for a while now and I get the hang of most of it but I would really value her opinion on this since she's really well known for her skinning abilities.


Thanks
Nicky

Hello Nicky,

I've now completed the mp3 interview. - I approached Tyler Fawcett, the dotnetnuke skinning competition winner for his Tranquility skin.

I will be releasing it in the next couple of days along with 16 videos on skinning and web design.

Nina always states that you should get to know how to use DNN before looking at skinning. - You need to know how to add content, move content around etc. Once you have a good grasp of DNN, you can then approach the skin design.

I think you will find the interview with Tyler interesting and informative, I will post here when I release it.

Thanks,