Hi Greg,

My advice is to first read the skinning guide.  It is located in the top menu under Resources > Documentation > Downloadable Files.  Once on the page look for the "Skinning Guide" PDF.

It seems like you need to learn the difference between Skins and Containers.  The Skin is the overall layout of the page, which is affected by the skin.css file and whatever ascx file you chose for that particular page.  Then around each module that you place within a page, you have a wrapper (Container) around each module.  This is basically that ugly blue gradient on top of each module in the defualt blue dnn skin.

The files for the skins are located in the folder Portals/_default/skins
the skins will use a CSS file called skin.css

And the files for the containers are located in the folder Portals/_default/Containters
containers will use a CSS file called container.css

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask any other questions you might have.

-James

Sorry I misunderstood.

With the modules themselves you pretty much have to learn on a module basis since they are all created by different developers.  Some modules make use of Tokens and some do not.  On the modules that use tokens you normally have some kind of settings page that will ask for a template in html format mixed with tokens.

As far as the core forums module, I don't have much experience with it.  It seems like the preconfigured forum templates are hard to come by.  If you just wanted to change simple things such as font size and background color, you just need to look for the css file that is being used. It looks like for the forum module, they stick the css in DesktopModules > Forum > Themes > Default > Default.css

There is also an images folder there that should contain the default images used in the forum.

Normally when I'm new to a module and want to figure out how to change the look, I first check out the styles that are being used by viewing the source in my browser.

In Internet Explorer:

- Right click the web page > View Source

- Then find some part of text to search for inside of the module.. In the forum module by default there is some text inside called "General". You can search whatever text you think will be unique in that individual module

- so in the source view that we opened, I hit Ctrl - F  and search for "General"

- it pops up with an instance of "General" and right before that you see class="Forum_NormalBold"

- so now we know that the the forum group title uses a css style called "Forum_NormalBold"

- go into the default.css file under the themes folder and change this style to your knew look

Such as:

.Forum_NormalBold, A.Forum_NormalBold:Link, A.Forum_NormalBold:Visited, A.Forum_NormalBold:Active, A.Forum_NormalBold:Hover
{
     font-size: 16px;
     font-weight: bold;
     font-family: Arial;
     color: red;
}

Hope this helps a little more than my last post.  Let me know if something doesn't make sense to you.

-James