Have you checked out the DotNetNuke Wiki for the DDR Menu? 
http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Resources/W...

Might be something there to help you.

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I would recommend that you examine the Dark Knight skin (great job, Ralph!) to see one example of how to use the skin.

For the most part, you can use the available templates (see the Wiki page for instructions on installing templates that might not be installed) and all that you will need to do is modify the skin.css file.

There are other excellent examples on the Codeplex site and also the "repository" site for templates.

If you want to create your own template, the documentation -- Codeplex and the Wiki -- describe the process quite well. I would recommend making a copy of an existing template and modifying rather than starting from scratch.

And, don't forget that the DDR menu can emulate the older DNN Nav menu. There is also some decent documentation for that. So, it's not like the DDR menu was dropped in with no backward compatibility.

I appreciate that you are not a DotNetNuke expert and that there my be a learning curve. But, as I've tried to say, you don't need to dig into the internals of the menu to get going and to get nice menus.

To answer one of your questions: Without any extra specification, the DDR Menu will use all of the pages (nodes) defined in your site, honoring the Disabled and Include In Menu settings from the page settings for each page. You can use the Include and Exclude Node options to fine tune this for special cases.

You'll hardly ever need to know about the other items unless you really are intending to create your own menu templates. I would avoid doing that right off the bat. There are probably tools built into the framework to accomplish most of what you will want to do.

And, failing that ... keep asking questions. The more specific the questions, the better will be the answers.

Best wishes!

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Joe Craig
Patapsco Research Group, Ellicott City, MD
DotNetNuke Development and Services (http://patapscorg.com)