I'm planning a site that will be resrticted to a centred (vert & horiz), 700x300 viewport.

For the basic deisgn, I have just two columns with:
- a collapsible/accordion menu in the first column and and
- all other content in the other.

[I may also have a banner area as shown at the  top and a small footer strip for copyright info etc.]

This will look roughly as below.

+---------------------------------------------+
|                                             |
|                                             |
|+-------------750x350-----------------------+|
||            +----------------------------+ ||
||            |      banner?               | ||
|| +--------+ +----------------------------+ ||
|| |        | |                            | ||
|| | menu   | |    content                 | ||
|| |        | |                            | ||
|| |        | |                            | ||
|| |        | |                            | ||
|| +--------+ +----------------------------+ ||
|+-------------------------------------------+|
|                                             |
|                                             |
+---------------------------------------------+

I have my html/css already (just the menu remains a problem). Is this posible with DNN?.

Would I be able to create a skin for this based on my html/css and be able to use it with DNN?. Actually, there will be a family of skinsbases on this for the four or page styles in the site e.g. home-page, gallery-page etc.  The differences  being whether the content colum is split into further columns and, whether there is a banner and/or footer strip.

[For the admin side of things, I plan to use a modification of a standard admin skin]

Our site (www.inventua.com) looks a bit like this (it's a full-width skin, but the menu and panes are similar).  We use our sidemenu module (http://www.inventua.com/dnn-sidemenu.content).  Starting with your existing HTML/CSS, you should be able to get this done in a fairly short time.  Have a read of DotNetNuke Skinning.doc (in your DotNetNuke/documentation/public directory) if you haven't already done so.

Although this one isn't "floating,' I think its similar to what you'd suggested.

http://www.maerskdata-defence.com/Default.aspx?tabid=122

This should be no problem whatsoever. Only thing to take into account is the fact that DNN adds some table tags around modules you put on pages. So you should more or less stick with a 'rectangular' design without 'floating' modules around other ones.

What you do inside a module (the text/html module), obviously is up to you.

npeeters wrote:

This should be no problem whatsoever.

Well, it was (and continues to be). As I mentioned I restrict everything to display in a horizontally and vertically centered 700x300 viewport. This is done using a tableless design presently and DNN simply chokes. By this I mean, I can see my skin's 700x300 viewport floating above the Admin control bar and a bunch of "error loading module" messages.

npeeters wrote:

Only thing to take into account is the fact that DNN adds some table tags around modules you put on pages. So you should more or less stick with a 'rectangular' design without 'floating' modules around other ones.

Well, I've got a tableless design presently using CSS for the centering and whatnot. Perhaps that's why DNN chokes. Is there a procedure for using tableless skins with DNN?. Has someone got a modified DNN that doesn't  assume that  tables are used for layout in the skins?


On a related note, I've written an ASP.NET menu server control that I'd like to use instead of TreeViewMenu and SolPartMenu. What do I need to do to get it playing nicely with DNN?