Wiliam Staff Team : Staff Tags : Technology
8Dec2006

DotNetNuke 4.3.6 - the Aftermath

Wiliam Staff Team : Staff Tags : Technology

Here is part 2 of my DotNetNuke experience. In part 1 I was moaning about how long things took to get up and running. I have now successfully deployed 3 skins to our client, who has expressed how happy they are with their skins. Tops! Here's my findings on DotNetNuke.

  • If you've never used DNN before, and are not a super-strong .NET programmer, make sure you set aside a bit of time (maybe a day) to familiarise yourself with the way things are done on planet DNN.
  • If you want a basic menu with popout links or a treeview, and don't care too much about the styling, you can quite comfortably use the built-in DNN menu control.
  • The most confusing thing to me was the skin.xml file that you needed to upload with your skin package - I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it was for. But now I am enlightened. You use it to define properties of the controls you are uploading. So, for example, if you want to use the DNN menu control, you would add this to your skin.xml:

 <Object>
  <Token>[SOLPARTMENU]</Token>
  <Settings>
   <Setting>
    <Name>separatecss</Name>
    <Value>true</Value>
   </Setting>
   <Setting>
    <Name>display</Name>
    <Value>vertical</Value>
   </Setting>
   <Setting>
    <Name>forcefullmenulist</Name>
    <Value>true</Value>
   </Setting>
  </Settings>
 </Object>

Look at the built-in DNN skins to see how it all ties together (e.g. the zip file in \Portals\_default\Skins\DNN-Blue)

  • If you want to do even the slightest bit of styling on your menu (background images etc.), for the sake of your mental health and wellbeing, use a third party control such as the free Obout Slidemenu. The Obout one is great because it's all managed code, meaning you can manipulate it via its very well written API using any .NET language. The built in menu generates really terrible code - I'm talking tables, td's, even nbsp's to do submenu indenting... blech!

DotNetNuke...in conclusion:

Pros - built in CMS, built in login / admin system

Cons - hard to setup for the novice user, not very flexible in terms of catering to reasonably complex designs, built-in menus generate very old-school code (hopefully we'll get a version with ULs and LIs soon)