Hello,

In this tutorial we demonstrate the ASCX method of DotNetNuke skinning. This is the method that the professional DotNetNuke skinners use as it is much quicker to build skins in this way.

Creating skins using the ASCX method has several benefits; the main one is that it is much faster to create a DotNetNuke skin using the ASCX method rather than the HTML/XML method. You can make changes live on the website without re-parsing or re-installing the skin, you can instantly see edits and changes you make to your skin code, you can view at a glance all of a skin tokens properties, and a really useful feature is that if you are using Visual Web Developer Express it will suggest the attributes that are available for each of the DotNetNuke tokens.

DotNetNuke ASCX Skinning for Professional Skinners
(6 videos - 58mins)

The videos cover:

• Video 1 - Introduction, Pros and Cons of ASCX Skinning
• Video 2 - Introduction to ASCX Skin Code and Setup in VWD Express
• Video 3 - How to Edit The ASCX Tokens, Configuring the Search Token
• Video 4 - How to Display 2 Nav Menus, How to Use SKINPATH for Images
• Video 5 - Skin CSS Code Speed Editing in ASCX skins
• Video 6 - Containers ASCX skinning

Thanks,

Lee

Might draw a distinction between "professional" and "commercial"

I would agree with Jan that commercially vended skins should be html / xml based and parsed by DNN to create the ascx file.

But professional skinners for a single custom situation might want to simplify with only modest downside and some upside in terms of ease of development.

Hello all,

Thanks for the feedback, yes I agree, if you are selling skins then you should release them as html versions so that the customers can easily adapt them for their own use. We have covered html skinning in all of the previous tutorials on dnn creative which you can see here (scroll down to the bottom):
http://www.dnncreative.com/Tutorials/tabid/261/Default.aspx

The idea of this tutorial is to demonstrate the benefits and speed that can be gained from ascx skinning, this is especially important for instance when developing skins for cororate clients to a tight deadline.

Rodrigo, we are not supposed to have big discussions in this announcements section of the forum, so to quickly provide an answer, you can setup a skin.xml file which each of your skins will read, if you want to download some free examples have a look here:
http://skintemplates.dnncreative.com

If you need further help, I would ask in the skinning section of this forum, or feel free to pop over to dnncreative.com and we can help in the forum over there,

Many Thanks,

Lee