Beginning DotNetNuke® Skinning and Design

Chapter 8. Designing the Navigation

The skinning project for the Montavilla Neighborhood Association website happily used the default menu skin object in DotNetNuke, until now. In this chapter, you take a closer look at the menu skin object and explore the options available to you.

A web page is rarely without a menu navigation system so visitors are subjected to many types of menus. Menus in DotNetNuke are usually implemented as skin objects. Skin objects are well suited for this specialized task. The following list describes the common traits of a skin object:

• Provides a small, contained feature for a DotNetNuke site.

• Exists inside of a DotNetNuke skin file.

• Can be customized through properties it makes available to the skin developer.

• Can be customized by editing the .ascx file in a text editor, if available.

• Can be customized by editing the VB.Net or C# code, if available.

• A similar skin object probably already exists.

• Easy to swap for a best-fit comparison.

Skin objects are nothing new, and you've dealt with them on a regular basis in the previous chapters. This chapter focuses on a particular type of skin object — those providing menu navigation services. A menu skin object has the ability to request the pages from DotNetNuke. The menu skin object formats the pages into a navigable list for a web page and emits the necessary HTML.

You'll see how to install a third-party skin object as well as configure alternative menu controls that are already available in a default installation. You'll ...