Beginning DotNetNuke® Skinning and Design

Chapter 11. Using Cascading Style Sheets

The previous chapters have given minimal explanation to CSS in lieu of other topics. DotNetNuke is so large that your focus at any given time on a project is limited to a small subset of the features. Hooray for checklists!

This chapter aims to make you proficient at reading and authoring a few CSS rules. You review some common CSS properties and how they can be used to build a custom design. Most sites make use of these rules in their style sheets; they always seem to throw in some uncommon CSS properties, too. If this is your starting point with CSS, you really ought to take a look at Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, 2nd Edition by Richard York (Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2007), for a more detailed study of CSS.

In this chapter, you learn the following details about CSS:

• The structure of a CSS rule in a style sheet

• How to target a block of HTML with a selector

• How to use margins and padding

• How to apply font treatment

• How to use background images

• How to use positioning for a custom layout

• How to edit default styles in DotNetNuke

Although there are many CSS properties, mastering fewer than ten will get you well on your way to understanding nearly any style sheet. This chapter starts with a focus on common CSS rules used on modern, standards-compliant sites. After the fundamentals are covered, you'll apply these skills inside the DotNetNuke framework.

Exploring CSS Fundamentals

This section takes a look at some common CSS rules used ...