Take a look at DNNCreative.com.  Worth the subscription price.

Jeff

Personally I think it all comes down to this: DNN does not have a formalized way of changing skins on the fly, the way many other CMS' have.

The Skin module should really implement a set of formal classes and properties which each skin designer could implement and live up to. There should be a GUI based way of changing the most basic parts of a skin, such as fonts and colors, in the DNN core skin module. For some reason the only thing which can be changed with ease is the logo file ... like the logo is all you ever need to change.

Providing the webmaster with a notepad-style editor window with a stylesheet in plaintext is really just a bad workaround to an obvious problem.

I have spent countless hours learning how to edit my skinfiles or edit the stylesheet for a DNN site in order to change simple things like the default font and default link layout.

If somebody wants me to write a proposal for such a change in the core skin functionality, throw me a message. I am no .NET coder, but I do know how to write a specification document.  And yes it should be a core functionality - having 3rd party modules that alter your DNN site in that way is a nightmare when upgrading the core.

- Jesper

As I said, I am not looking for a way to alter the entire skin. That would sort of ruin the whole idea of having a skin in the first place. But not being able to alter even the simplest things without editing skin files simply makes DNN less "webmaster-friendly" than other CMS frameworks. I am not writing that to start a flamewar - it is simply an observation. And you can verify it by simply looking at the features of DNN's "competitors" in the CMS marketplace.

A formal interface or set of classes that define the 5-10 most simple things, would not be impossible. There are some simple things, that all skins simply have - and which could be administered from a central "Skin control panel". Honestly: it should not be that hard for the skin designers to use a predefined set of CSS classnames and objectnames. The following simple items could with great advantage be editable throuogh such a simple control panel:

• Logo file
• Background color for main website
• Background image for main website
• Background color for containers
• Background image for containers
• Default font and style for container headings
• Default font and style for Text/HTML content
• Default font and style for top-level menu text
• Default font and style for sub-level menu text
• Show portal name (boolean)
• Show copyright notice (boolean)
• Show todays date (boolean)
• Show Terms for use (boolean)
• Show Privacy statement (boolean)
• Show search input box (boolean)

All these things are simple things which all skins use (or could use). It would be no problem for the skin designer to comply with a simple set of rules in order for this to work (or simply choose not to comply). Skins which comply with these simple editing functions/rules could me called "DNN Skin control panel compliant" or something like that, so the skin customers could identify the compliant skins.

I honestly do not see any technical issues in this. The only reason it is not allready available in DNN has to be due to the fact that DNN is mainly coded BY geeks FOR geeks. But every CMS framework with a desire to survive, must improve itself with each new release.

:-)

- Jesper