Hi - I thought I'd let you know that I've produced a video yesterday - it's getting the directors cut at the moment.
I had some posts on my forum http://www.dnnskins.com from people saying skins were not installing, but we test everything before we upload, and so I thought to myself, how hard can all this be.
WELLLLL... I ended up creating about 10 different iterations of that video. Stop and start and check.. is this right??? And then realising that things have changed signficantly. I had to go back and check our skin packages, and now if you combine the method in how thousand of skins were created and packaged in dnn 2, 3& 4, and take the fact they can't be installed the same way now, and people have to repackage the skins, and the naming convention, how it can affect how it's displayed, and the fact I couldn't work out how to delete the skins, which said they were deleted but were not, so I deleted manually, and then I couldn't reinstall them, because they were there but they're not.... I spent over 5 hours trying to do a 20 minute video and I'm an expert.. (I say that because I have been doing this since the day DNN started)
I thought when I came up with the concept of my facebook fans page, and having free skins for those who show some incentive too and indicate that there is still interest in providing free skins, this would be a great idea to start getting some lightweight, xhtml & css compliant skins online, and to date, we've got 15 more, really nice free skins online, packaged for dnn 4 & 5, and we don't seem to have issues with them, but the few detailed posts I've got, indicated that there has been some struggles and the last thing I want, is have my free stuff give people problems. We've now got over 100 skins and I think we'll have to go back an revisit many of them. Not really what I want to do, I know these are free, and don't have the same support as our commercial work, but it goes against the grain of how we work at XD.
Soooooo.... I sat down last night thinking.. how hard can this be... I can tell you, it has changed. I don't think you should pay for instructions either, when it comes to installation of skins.
I have an old video for dnn 3 days which would have been relevant, until dnn 5 came along and now, it's not really any good because for dnn 5 - the locations aren't even the same, nor the procedure, not the method of packaging. I feel having that online will confuse people.
I'm really sorry you've experienced this frustrations. DNN is a great journey once you get on that horse and ride it, but oh my, lately, I either can't find the stirrup, the saddle, and in some cases the horse!
So if you can wait a few more hours, you can view detailed instructions, comparing both dnn 4 & dnn 5, looking at the skin packages and how they vary, and how they need to be installed. I tried to make it under 10 mins for Youtube - I think i'll have to split it up into three so people can confidently managing skins when they get them, and if they don't work, understand where the changes need to be done.
I will be posting online today and will post a link here when it's done.
Thanks for this post - it really does confirm what I was thinking.
Nina Meiers