Hi all,

I am trying to get the basics of skinning, and I am having trouble with just about everything.  I can't seem to get the ZIP file correct.  Does anyone have a sample of ZIP file, or something that I can look at?  I have the Skinning Whitepaper, but I am having trouble getting the concept of how everything needs to be structured into the ZIP file.

I have found the sites at www.akrion.net and www.dnncreative.com very helpful.  There are some free skins you can download, and for a modest subscription to dnncreative you can download lots of materials, including videos, on the basics of skinning.

Best of luck

John Stodden

Thanks, John.

Those did help out some, but I am still having problems getting this to work.  It seems that there is plenty of documentation on DNN 3.x, but not 4.x.  I think there are some differences, since when I upload the ZIP file, the files get up there, but in the wrong place.  They end up on level too deep.

That is only the beginning of my troubles, but the rest are mostly messing around with the HTML and skn.xml files to figure them out.  I would appreciate better error messages than 'Duplicate ID attributes'.  It would be helpful if it told me where it saw the duplicate, so I know where to look. 

Any tips anyone can give me would be appreciated.  What about a book that will help me with skinning? Any suggestions on those?

I will keep looking through the resources you sent, as I see that there is a bunch of info on both sites.

Most of the DNN 3 skins that I have tried work fine in DNN4, so if the skins end up one level too deep you are probably uploading a file in the wrong format.  Try opening the zip file before sending and checking that it contains skins.zip and containers.zip.  Anything else, and you probably need to extract and rezip.  I am building 2 sites using Akrion.net skins and they work fine in DNN4.  Good as a learning excercise as well.

I am going crazy.  I got something to work that I can show my client BUT, I have no idea on how I got it to work.  I cannot recreate the success.  I have not touched my working example, so I will be able to successfully demonstrate DNN for them.  The skin still needs a lot of work, and I am not able to make it work on anything else.  I even created a very basic, plain skin, and I cannot get it to work.

Is there someway for me to send a ZIP file to someone so they can tell me what I am doing wrong?  Are there any handholding for dummies tutorials out there?  I haven't seen any good, complete, tutorials, yet.  I really want to use DNN, as I can see its value for myself and my clients.

My frustration level is starting to rise quite a bit.  I didn't really think it would be (or should be) this difficult.  I am sure it is something small I am missing (or at leat I hope so )

Handholding for dummies?  Have you subscribed to dnncreative yet?  I gave you the link previously.  It will give you a load of videos which is excellent training and it covers skinning from scratch as well as other topics such as creating a DNN module.  Dnn4 skinning is no different to DNN 3 skinning in principle.

John Stodden

Ok, I will try that out.  $35 / yr seems reasonable to get all the info I need to make this work.

Thanks for assuring me that DNN 3 and 4 work mostly the same.  I thought that was the case, I was just starting to wonder about it.

Handholding for dummies , I guess that does look odd.

You are welcome to send it to me nuke @ nickclements.net

I'll take a look over the weekend

Thanks Nick.

Right now I am running through some really good tutorials, and I am confident that I can get this to work this weekend.  If I can't, I may ask to send them to you next week, and see what you can find.  At this point, I have seen many things I did wrong on the first try (nothing new there).

The dnncreative.com website has been gold to me :)