DotNetNuke® Websites: Problem — Design — Solution

5.2. Design

This section focuses on packaging DNN skins with intuitive filenames to make site administration straightforward and efficient. This section also focuses on installing DNN skins and applying them to a live DNN instance. In this chapter you learn:

• How to create a single-packaged skin install file

• The difference between installing a skin package at the Admin level and at the Host level

• How to install a single-packaged skin install file

• How to install separate container.zip files

• How to preview installed skins

• How to apply skins and containers to a DNN website globally

• How to delete skin packages

If you ask any experienced DNN developer which key features set DNN apart from other Content Management Systems (CMS), open source or otherwise, you will find the skinning engine to be at, or near, the top of the list. In fact, you'll be hard-pressed to find another CMS framework that makes it so easy to change or apply a skin to a website. Not even Microsoft Sharepoint, DNN's closest competitor (and an expensive one at that) can offer this capability. The capability to upload a single Zip file and apply a different look to a website in seconds is very powerful indeed. But you'll be happy to know that, even though the technology is quite powerful, the actual process of packaging, installing, and applying a skin to a DNN website is not a complicated procedure, as you will now see.