Hi
I'm fairly new to DNN, the only exposure I have to cms's is Joomla, altough I acutally work as a .net developer, meaning I have a fairly good grasp of the .net basics.
First off I'm building the skin using the [TOKEN] syntax. Problem is I don't quite understand how, by moving these tokens around in the HTML, the skin either parses or not. Here's some HTML with tokens. The code shown here parses fine. However once I actually comment the first [CONTENTPANE] out and uncomment the bottom one the skin no longer parses. Why is that?
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="skin.css" />
<title></title>
</head>
<body id="body">
<div id="outer_container">
<div class="template_style">
[LOGIN]
<div class="logo_top">
<div class="logo_top_left">
<div class="logo_top_right">
<div class="logo_top_bg">
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="banner_bg">
</div>
<div class="middle_bg">
<div class="middle_left_bg">
<div class="middle_right_bg">
<div class="middle_content">
<object id="QuickMenu" codetype="dotnetnuke/server" codebase="CONTENTPANE">
</object>
[CONTENTPANE]
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="main_menu">
<div class="main_menu_left_bg">
<div class="main_menu_right_bg">
<div class="main_menu_bg">
[LINKS]
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<!--[CONTENTPANE]-->
</div>
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
I'm used to joomla which works pretty much the same except there you can move these placeholders anywhere on the page without breaking anything?
Lastly I'm edting the HTML file from within VS2008. I understand that the HTML with it's tokens get compiled into an ascx file. However once, I've parsed a skin successfully through the site and return to VS it asks me "...the code has been modified outisde the environment. Do you want reload?"
And heaven forbid I answer yes to that, because then it takes over and just removes some of my code - basically messing up my HTML.
Why???
Perhaps I'm voilating some DNN basics here and apologise if so, but can someone please point me in the right direction ?
Thanks in advance 