Building custom skin objects for DNN

In DotNetNuke  terminology, a skin is a template control that imparts the overall look and feel for pages in the web site. A skin file defines the content panes with the exact position and size required where the content is to be placed. Dotnetnuke provides a wide range of skinsets by default. Besides, custom skin files can also be developed and used in websites and the skin files created will involve the use of skin objects.

Skin objects are simply asp.net user controls that can be included in the DNN skins to provide some functionality. For ASCX skins, the developer will have to specify the user control using the @Register tag.  HTML skin files  need to include the token for the required control and later the token will get replaced with the control while parsing the skin for upload.

Each skin object has its own set of attributes. For ASCX skins the attributes can be specified in the skin file itself. whereas for HTML skins, a separate file is maintained with the attributes specification.

There are many core skin objects say, login, breadcrumb, menu etc. included in the DNN which implements the most common and widely used functionalities and these can be found in the Admin/Skins folder of your DNN installation. Apart from these there might be a requirement for the DNN developer to create a custom skin objects. Custom skin object development is similar to the custom module development.

Skin objects prove to be a very powerful tool to add common UI uniformly to all pages of the website.

DNN Team @ SoftwareAssociates