Beginning DotNetNuke Skinning and Design

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 the

Andrew Hay is a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer and the Director of Software Development at Pop Art, Inc. After graduating in 1995 with a B.S. from North Central College in Naperville, IL, he started his career at Peoples Energy in Chicago. Here, he wrote and maintained Assembly language code for an IBM OS/360 Mainframe computer. Some of these programs exceeded Andrew’s age. In the late 1990s, he was lured into the web development world with everyone else and joined The Information Management Group, Inc., also located in Chicago. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and winner of the Certified Technical Education Center of the Year award, this company was prime spot to witness the first release of the Microsoft .Net Framework. In late 2002, Andrew and his wife Kari moved to Portland, OR where he joined Pop Art, Inc. His current interests include standards-based web development, ASP.Net AJAX, and making the next batch of homebrew beer with his friends.