Ok si i may have misunderstood or misstated some of my request

what i want to be able to do is use expression web v4 to edit DNN in a live setting  so i can "see" as in wysiwyg visually the changes i have made to a document  IN expression web   as i make the changes

Rob

after doing an extensive search i think i may have found something ( at least for the css part)  please take a look at http://www.skybound.ca/  their product which is called stylizer  seems to come close   they have a free trial.  if you have time could you take a look and give me your opinion ?  it would be greatly appreciated P.S. i would love to see this feature set built directly into dnn  Hint hint  possible new product for the dnn community

thanks again rob

Steve Gables

I'm pretty sure it's about editing skins... Steve.. just confirm that you are talking about editing the skins i.e. the design and structure of the pages, and not the text and images displayed on the pages?

I have tried Stylizer twice in the past. It looks at first like the ideal solution, but it turned out to be more cumbersome to use with DNN than what I was already doing.
 
I should have mentioned one more tool that forms a vital part of the skin editing cycle. That tool is the Firefox Firebug plugin. Firebug lets you inspect and edit CSS and even HTML and script live in the web browser.

I open the site in Expression Web, go to the skin folder I'm working on and open the ASCX and CSS files I want to work on.
Then I click the button to view the site in Firefox. If there is something that I need to mess with, I simply right-click the location on the page and select "Inspect Element". Firebug then displays the relevant HTML and CSS, complete in the proper cascade.

It's simple to click on a tag in the HTML and then modify or add CSS - Add new styles by double-clicking in the CSS inspector pane. Firebug does the intellisense thing and lets you flip between valid values simply by pressing the up/down arrrows. You can easily adjust padding and margins and whatever else.  You can copy the modified style and paste it into EW, hit save, refresh and you're set for further editing. If you need to change the HTML structure or add a class to a tag, you do it right there in EW, save and refresh.

Having plenty of levels of undo that an app like EW offers is also helpful in all of this. It's also simple and quick to select any file or folder and CTRL-C and CTRL-V to make a copy or a backup.

Another tool that also helps with CSS is the Firefox Web Developer toolbar. Install that, view your site and press CTRL+Shift+E and you get a tabbed view of all applied stylesheets in the proper cascade. You can edit the CSS right there and see the results in real time. I often use this when troubleshooting or when I want to move blocks of CSS around for testing things. Once you've got the CSS how you want, just copy and paste back into EW, save and refresh.

If all of this is still too much drama, then there is that Aristeer program that makes DNN skins. I don't use it, but have examined some skins made with it. It seems to work ok.

Those Firefox tools complete the editing cycle by giving you the ability to edit CSS live on teh site. The act of then saving your changes is handled by EW, VS, or whatever else you want to use. The other browsers also have developer tools, but I've had very little luck with the ones on Opera or Chrome/Safari. The tools in IE8/9 give you a dregree of live editing which can also be useful on occasion.
Rob