I skinned a Community Server site, what a pain!

I've skinned, or tweaked a CommunityServer site before, but what I must admin, it's definitely not an easy process, and not something I'd want anyone to have to go through!

I just skinned Solo2.org The Ultimate Autocross Web Site tonight to get change the design. Skinning within CS has to be one of the biggest pain in the rear things to do. I've skinned many a DotNetNuke site, and though the Solpart Menu can be rather tricky, no skinning project with DNN has ever been as hard as it was just to make some simple changes to CommunityServer to make Solo2.org look like it does now. I realize Telligent says they've made skinning easier with their new release for 2007 (everyone and their mother has blogged about it over the past 4 days, twice) but I can't imagine skinning getting much easier than the skinning engine that DotNetNuke has implemented.

"Here here" to the guys (core team) who developed that engine nearly three years ago now!

I've still got a lot of work left to do with s2o, but at least it's not the plain jane site it used to be a few hours ago. Oh yeah, I actually started working on this skin for CS back in October, I quit working on it after 2-3 tries, until tonight when I crunched through the rest of it.

Take a look at the site, let me know what you think.

*disclaimer: I may be a little biased towards DotNetNuke, being my position within the DNN Team, but I do use CommunityServer on two of my largest websites, http://sccaforums.com/ and http://solo2.org/, and of course, my blogs at http://chrishammond.com http://themadblogger.org and http://65lbs.com/

 

 

6 Comments

  • Looks good Chris...well done!

  • Yeah I feel the pain. I tried almost a year ago for my own personal site and just got sick of it so I left the default theme, but changed some layouts.

    As for DNN, I love the skinning ability!!! IT IS SIMPLE! Except for SolPart Menu which I'm having trouble with right now due to a vertical menu layout. Do you have or know of any links that has some successful DNN SolPart Menu styles?

  • Getting the Solpart menu skinned vertically is not an easy task, we had a guy in the office who scrapped 2 days worth of work on a vertical solpart to use the Inventua menu module and had it done in 30 minutes.

  • CS 3.0 isn't too far off... trust me, skinning is 3.0 will be a pleasure. Check out Ben's blog, since he has been posting a great series on how skinning will work on CS 3.0. I know it sucks to wait, but will be well worth it, and it is getting much closer to having a public build.

  • I'm curious, could you speak a few words about CommunityServer vs DNN? Why one versus the other?

  • Sure, but don't tell me I'm biased after I say this :)

    Community Server excels at setting up a Community, as the name states, it's a great way to setup blogs and forums (even photos sometimes) for a quick and easy community website.

    DotNetNuke is a great tool for doing EVERYTHING, If you want to add blogs, forums, photos, guestbook, calendar, shopping cart, file manager, feedback, contact us form, surveys, (the list goes on) to a website, DotNetNuke is the easy way to do this. If you don't want to developer code yourself, there are hundreds if not thousands of modules out there you can download for free or purchase from various sites to do just about anything you may need to do on your site.

    Does DNN do the blogs and forums as well as CommunityServer? No, but I think that may change. The new forums module that's coming is pretty darn slick, blogs still need some work to get up to standard, but the DNN Blog module is still a powerful tool.

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