Hi Rune,

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply and for carefully posting the links accordingly.

In a way I suppose I feel justified in asking now as obviously the material you suggested I had already managed to find and couldn't believe that was it. I wouldn't mind paying for the manual but from the description it appears to be geared at running and administering a dotnetnuke portal/website and not creating one.

I first looked at DotNetNuke a year and a half ago and despite coming from a programming and design background - gave it a miss. Seeing version 5 was announced I thought I'd give it another look for our corp. as we've yet to standardize.

What's quite frustrating is the word "easy" keeps cropping up through the various DNN descriptions with an emphasis on useability for people with no HTML or technical experience. I've shown our numerous potential end users this interface and I have to say they didn't find it self explanatory and certainly required training for your sample skins & modules. Even editing content proved to be a problem as it never really looks like you want it after an update - and don't get me started on explaining how to position images to the users!

All that said, as a technical presenter too, I am quite determined to get to the bottom of this skinning technique and then I will make some decent quality, step by step clear videos along with a showcase of a few finished websites that people new to this product can follow in a coherent manner without having to pay this that and the other to third party companies benefitting from the distinct lack of documentation or tuition.

DotNetNuke team - there are loads of CMS systems out there - Skinning really, really - no seriously, really should be a lot more accessible. Webinars are great but they are out of date and quite frankly don't go far enough. A simple but detailed set of video narrations on your dotNetNuke home page would do wonders for new users especially when presented in conjunction with some really nice looking websites and not your default skin so new users can see what they're aiming at. Until this is accomplished, new customers are going to be put off. I hope I can contribute accordingly and be valuable to the community.

Many thanks again Rune for taking the time to reply.

Mark

I'm trying to install a custom skin that my predecessor created and installed in DNN 4 on our current portal. I'm on a separate portaI with DNN 5, logged in as the host, and went through the installation wizard. Under the Admin menu I selected Skins and selected the skin that my predecessor created, however it says No Skin Files Exist In Folder. Any input as to why this would be is greatly appreciated.