I'm implementing DNN in a school and want to be able to "force feed" a skin to every portal (each teacher has a portal) without having to administer each portal separately. I assume the correct approach would be to leave the portals skins "not specified". But (noobness here) where is the code that points "not specified" to a particular skin?

Or would a better way to accomplish this be to set up the entire school as one portal with teachers simply having separate pages? Seems like potential problems would be isolated better having multiple portals...

Your patience and instruction are appreciated!

Thanks for the reply, Jeff. I was hoping to be able to simply replace the default skin (in the default folder), which would make sense. However, my Portals/_default/Skins/_default folder only has No Skin.ascx in it. The Portals/_default/Skins folder then has DNN-Blue and DNN-Gray. DNN-Blue is defined as the default skin when a new page is created with an unspecified skin.

I thought perhaps DNN was simply picking the first skin folder (alphabetically) as its default, but I can create a skin folder that precedes DNN-Blue and DNN-Blue is still the default skin. Seems like I'm either looking in the wrong default folder or that the default skin assignment is being made in code somewhere. Perhaps the thing to do is change the skin, when the time comes, using a query on the database?

This wouldn't be a problem if my final skin were available when new portals are created. But I'm hoping to create 200 portals and THEN go back later and change the "global" skin.

Thanks again.

You can update the skin via sql yes.

if you run this script in the sql window you can see the skinSrc currently in use and the ContainerSrc. These values are what gets set in the page settings.

Select * from tabs

That will display the contents of the tabs aka pages table. NOTE: Some people / hosts tell DNN to put a prefix on the tables in the databases. If so you need to add the prefix to the tabs part. so: Select * from prefix_tabs

If you have direct access to the database its easiest to just go in and manually "copy" and paste the values you want onto the rows / pages you want. So if you want pages x,y,z to all use the skin named EnglishTeacher. You just open the table and make the changes to the skinSrc column.

OR if you dont have access you can do something like.

update tabs Set skinSrc = "value for the skin" where TabID = <tabid of page to be updated>

You can get both the value for the skin and the tabid from running the Select * from tabs results. Or you can run this query to get the different SkinSrc : Select * from skins.

You can zing through a ton of tabid's / pages in a quick succession if you write all them down that need a particular skin.

Can copy and paste the same code multiple times.

DISCLAIMER I HEREBY ADVISE YOU WITH ALL THAT IS SACRID TO BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE RUNNING ANY SQL COMMANDS AGAINST IT. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The code is sound but if you mess up the tabid, or mess up typing in the skin's path etc and you don't catch it right away it can be a pain to recover from. Its possible but a pain.