Dotnetnuke™ For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Customizing the Look of Your Site with Components

In This Chapter

• Understanding component

• Installing the telerik r.a.d.editor

• Replacing the DNN editor with FCKeditor

• Adding HTTP compression

• Enabling Friendly URLs

• Customizing site navigation with a telerik skin object

When you build a Web site with DotNetNuke, you add modules to pages to create the site. This is very similar to how DotNetNuke itself was designed. The DotNetNuke application was designed as a series of individual components that all work together to create the application you use to build your Web sites. This design makes DotNetNuke very flexible, and means that, with a little bit of skill, you can easily change different aspects of the application without having to write any code yourself.

Take for example the Text/HTML module: You can edit the content of your page by using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. The WYSIWYG editor is actually a component of DotNetNuke and you will see it in lots of different modules, such as the Announcements module. Now say that you want to use a different WYSIWYG editor that has some other features, such as a spell checker. The component architecture of DotNetNuke means that you can switch which type of editor you use for editing rich text just by following a few simple steps, as you see a bit later in this chapter.

There are three types of components that make up DotNetNuke: providers, HTTP modules, and skin objects. We discuss each of these and show you how to change ...