Stuart,

This sounds like a wrong approach (for DNN) to me. I think that skin objects are the way to go if you have stuff that should appear on every page. Skin objects are every bit as programmable as modules, but they are more technical and lack any pretty UI to control them.

So somthing like a page footer, for example, I think belongs in the skin, not in a module instance that you then try to push onto every page or most pages.

A module instance is NOT somthing assigned to a page. In DNN it's at the intersection of a page, and a skin pane, that's a lower level of granularity than the page. This gives DNN arguably more flexibility than some of the competition, but does mean that the concepts cannot be trivially interchanged between the different CMS's. In DNN it may, and often is, repeated at that intersection (two HTML modules in the same pane for example).

There is one blunt instrument available here. You can have the same module instance placed on EVERY page. I have experimented with that setting in the past, and largely abandoned it.

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Best wishes,
- Richard
Agile Development Consultant, Practitioner, and Trainer
www.dynamisys.co.uk

I agree, that looks by far the best approach. some questions.
We would probaly have to convert / develop our existing plugins anyway but what about some of the commercial modules that we might be using, are we able to use them as Skin objects?.
For example if they are in the desktop modules folder can we not just reference them as we would the menu object etc, I guess the set up options might be difficult to implement?.

Second question, is there any good documentation on developing skin objects out there as it does look as though we should develop our own skin objects.

 Stuart,

there is a blog by Mitchel Sellers treating this, and some more results if you use Google. Another way (that I often use) is taking a simple skin object and see how it's done by reading the source code. Most of the development is not too difficult if you have some experience with ASP.Net web forms.

Best wishes
Michael

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