Thank you Bill for responding to this - I just want to let you all know that I've not received any email from DotNetNuke since 16th May, 2006 - it just stopped on day - and I've been trying very hard to get it working again, it doesn't make it past my mail server spam filters and if I let it in, I'm back to 300+ spam a day!! So I missed this post. I apologise for this.
Yes I'm using the DNN Stuff tabbed aggregator at the moment on XD. It allows me to display information without page refresh, and I want to point out that the use of containers is a personal one. I've seen them used beautifully in websites, but can take a while longer to customise.
The point made about xdmediablue - is an example of how, if not designed to be independent, only one style is reflected in the whole page. For example, I learnt this back in 2004 (sounds long ago, but the pain is still there when I look at some files) - I had this idea of putting in lots of different colours containers on my page, and created fancy dark background, light text and light background, dark text containers and merrily installed them thinking - wow this looks hot, mind you after I'd already spent quite a while on them.
Then, to my horror, it took on the first placed container, a light one as the default colour. It is an obvious reason why - but I didn't pick it up while creating them. And the result is - each container requires it's own full class set, often including TD elements to override any of the skin settings too.
There are other elements I find with containers that are also somewhat frustrating and that's if you're using fluid/fixed methods of designing and % in tables, and visible-=true/false or padding on panes, or emty cells or modules that push things out a bit.
And example I'm talking about is the XDFused skin - Now I tested that on my stock testing platform but see it's got this annoying habit of not displaying some of the bottom corners on some sites, using some modules. and when collapsing doesn't behave like it should, so to work around it, I put in some fixed width containers to see if that would would help but the result hasn't been 100% and I believe it's got something to do with the skin design and how the containers are coded, since it seems to behave ok in other skins.. and other containers seem to be ok in that skin.
It might sound like I'm disorganised or something but it's not that - I use very similar prinicples when starting every single project, but of course an idea comes along that I think I might try - or read something and wonder about implementing that - and with my free skins I have to really always keep in mind the experience of the audience/user - they are often just testing things. So now I've found that I've released a couple of skins that need revisiting (hence my purpose for registration to download)
Having said that - now that my technical problems are over, I'm back on track after the tragic death of my staff member, I've caught up with work and sleep, I've been able to revisit these skins, and last week we installed them all on dnn 4.3.1 & 3.3 without any hiccups at all, but will spend the time to clean up these little nuances I've found and we're repackaging them - I'm looking at an installer method at the moment that allows me to put my own systems in place and provide more structure to what I offer for free downloads.
I've spoken to alot of people over the last 6 months, and in particular a few who are asking me to compare with other CMS products (which I have to remind them it's not a CMS - it's an application framework) and the single most favourable comment that comes back to me is the skinning engine. There's not any other application that allows you to completely replicate a site (except flash) into their product with the same outstanding results that DNN provides and the fact you can simply plug in solutions, particularly ecommerce, forums and galleries, still have a normal website is going to be a good driver in the future when offering this solution. And for developers, well, the Microsoft tools really do lend themeselves to being some of the finest around and I suppose this is because it's a commercial venture.
Skinning to me is a skill within itself, which I've started forming my own best practices, many of which are based on workarounds with DNN - eg.. things we think are bugs may not be, but simply by design therefore we work around them, and sites that have different users, audience, skill levels, you name it - all refect on the decisions made when create a skin.
I personally think my skills lie in the area of working with designers and developers/end user. And having made more mistakes than I care to admit, can pick a problem a mile off... becuase as soon as I see a design, I'm mentally breaking it up skinnable elements. And this has been learnt through trial and error, trial and error and at the end of the day- I found that containers did take up alot of my time on sites that people didn't want to spend the money on, so I suppose I looked for other wasy - graphics, html, icons, pane backgrounds etc.
What this has done is also helped make a page lighter - there are very few containers that can live without tables - and putting 4 - 5 on page that might already have some complexity also adds to the weight of the page, so that's another consideration in the decision process.
I thought I'd add a bit more thought in this post, for extra reading since it appears that you've expressed interest, asked questions which were not answered, and I simply missed this post (and probaly several others) since I don't get any email any more - I've heard it's being looked at, but not even my gmail account is getting it - so fingers crossed it won't be long.
One thing I learnt with DNN is patience... patience.. and more patience.
Thanks
Nina Meiers