Create your own DotNetNuke Skin

If you are looking to create your own DotNetNuke skin there are several tutorials available which will walk you through from the very beginning through to advanced skinning techniques.

If you look at Issues 5 and 6 - Working with skins this introduces you to the basics of DotNetNuke skinning, where you are introduced to the concepts of skinning, setup preparations, and how to create a skin and container using tables.

Once you have got to grips with the basic techniques further advanced techniques are developed in Issue 7 – Developing and enhancing skins where you can learn how to create resizable text, how to test the skins, standard compliance modes.

Pure CSS skinning is then taught in Issue 9 – Advanced Content Styling Techniques and CSS and the following issues, more advanced techniques of CSS skinning are demonstrated in Issue 25 – Pure CSS SEO Layouts for DotNetNuke skins

There are thousands of free CSS XHTML templates available, if you wish to convert one of those templates into a DotNetNuke skin you can learn how to do that in
Issue 28 - CSS Skinning from a XHTML Template, OpenForce 07, Podcasts - part 2
Issue 27 - CSS Skinning from a XHTML Template, OpenForce 07, Podcasts

If you wish to learn DotNetNuke skinning we recommend that you view the issues released on DNN creative magazine in issue number order as each issue builds on the knowledge taught in the previous issues.

DotNetNuke Podcasts OpenForce

12 DotNetNuke podcasts have been made available for free download from the new DotNetNuke Podcast site.

These podcasts are interviews by Lee Sykes with the attendees of the DotNetNuke OpenForce conference in Las Vegas.

Interviews include:

• Nik Kalyani - DotNetNuke Core Team
• Tony Valenti and John Grange - PowerDNN Hosting
• Peter Donker - Bring2Mind
• Sebastian Leupold - DotNetNuke Core Team
• Attendees of the DotNetNuke presentations
• Tracy Wittenkeller, Malik Khan, Alex Delreal, and Brad Schafer
• Peter Schotman – Cestus Websites - DNN Menus
• Charles Nurse – DotNetNuke Core Team - DotNetNuke Performance
• Jon Henning – DotNetNuke Core Team
• Cathal Connolly – DotNetNuke Core Team
• Joe Brinkman – DotNetNuke Core Team
• Kelly Ford – DNN Dev - XMOD

DotNetNuke CSS Skinning from a XHTML Template, OpenForce 07

This tutorial is in two parts, part 1 covers how to transfer the structure of an XHTML template into a DotNetNuke skin and how to adapt it to create the content panes, the menu and various DotNetNuke tokens and part 2 (released in the next issue) covers how to create the containers, semantically coding the content, styling and formatting the content, overriding the DotNetNuke default classes, how to easily add the additional skin layout variations, and how to setup and create a print.css file so that you can style your own print layout of the skin.

The tutorials demonstrate the skinning presentation that Lee Sykes gave at the OpenForce conference, except for in much more detail! The skinning demonstration at the conference was 30 minutes; we have turned this into 2 x 1 hour video tutorials.

Checkout:
How to create a DotNetNuke CSS skin from an XHTML template – part 1

How to create a DotNetNuke CSS skin from an XHTML template – part 2