Just my two cents...
I designed my first skin with pure XHTML using absolutely positioned DIVs that stretch the width of the screen. I was shocked when I realized that the controlpanel was buried behind my header and that the skin didn't adjust for it to fit. Duh right? I felt pretty dumb, but was persistent. I then tried changing the order and nesting of my DIVs and relatively positioning them (using a javascript to pick between two separate stylesheets for IE and Mozilla). That proved not to work great for me. My goal was to get away from HTML Tables altogether. I wound up frazzled and at my wits end and decided to just go with tables and make it work as best as possible. It worked much much better. I truly wish I had the time to figure out pure CSS (and have done plenty of searching on the web) but in the end, if you are using DNN, I recommend just going with tables. It's more cumbersome to try to make pure XHTML work great in DNN. Hopefully that is something they will address in the future, but I'm sure there's bigger fish to fry.

On a slightly different note, I was having some loading time problems with my DNN site and chalked it up to the nested tables, but after doing some reading I found that ASP.NET closes down after an hour of inactivity on my server. I set a scheduled even to hit my site hourly and it now loads in 3-5 seconds every time! I'm obviously not a high traffic site, but it is important that when someone hits my site that it be fast as it is a representation of my work. And although HTML tables are more of a pain than pure XHTML, they are less of a pain in DNN than pure CSS. I'll take the trade-off until someone points me in the right direction.

well first of all yous houldt try to make a table-less skin with abasilute positioned divs this will be very messed up in admin vieuw

If you set it up correctly a tableless dnn skin is very straightforward if you use floated divs. Below are my last 3 skin design the first is my own personal site that im still trying to finish ( alst complete multilanguage skin ) and the other 2 are large information/content heavy portals that look about the same in 95% of all browsers.

http://www.schwingsoft.com

http://www.politieknieuws.nl

http://z.nu.nl

There are no control panel issues for the admin in these skins. But what you need to do is have the action menu in your container replaced with the standard dropdownactions from old dnn2 days. This is because the solpartactions dont like it if you use different doctypes

 

 

 

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Armand Datema

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Hi Timo, I have tried your suggestion with the code below but while the LOGO div does jump below the ControlPanel, the BANNER doesn't. Any help would be appreciated!

I have based my tests on a copy of the DNN-Blue skin template, have made a copy inside my DNN Starter Kit Project and modified the Horizontal Menu - Full Width.ascx control:

1. removed this

<TR>

<TD id="ControlPanel" runat="server" class="contentpane" valign="top" align="center"></TD>

</TR>

2. inserted the following code after the Register tags:

<div id="main">

<div id="content">

<div style="width: 100px; height: 100px">

<dnn:LOGO runat="server" id="dnnLOGO" />

</div>

<div style="width: 100px; height: 100px; z-index: 100; left: 347px; position: absolute; top: 8px;">

<dnn:BANNER runat="server" id="dnnBANNER" />

</div>

</div>

</div>

<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

TIA,

Pieter