How do I update DotNetNuke Skins?

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I'm doing what are largely content updates for a DNN website of a small company. They want to update the nav section, which I've found is a part of the skin, and not a module. I'm not the original one who built this website either; so DNN was new to me from the start.

I don't have direct server access but contacts who do. Is there any convenient way to update the HTML/CSS on the Admin level when logged into the website? Or can this only be done from the server/files?

Also, I had the DBA's give me the entire skin's directory, which is all *.ascx files. I don't see any CSS or elements of the page that need to be updated though within these files. Do these Skin Objects exist on a SQL server? It does not look like we have access to the original HTML/CSS files.

Bottom-line question -- how do Skin Objects get updated (HTML/CSS wise)? I've checked out the Admin->Advanced Settings->Skins->Skin Designer section, but it looks essentially useless for what needs to be done.

Thanks!

1
dotnetnuke
Server/files. You can edit "Portal.css" via the admin/site settings, that will override CSS as it is loaded very late in the page load, but you can't adjust the HTML without getting to the files themselves. – Chris Hammond

1 Answers

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Skins should usually have a skin.css in the skin's directory (or a subdirectory). But there are a couple other places you can modify the CSS. The Portal.css in the portal's root directory (e.g. /Portals/0/portal.css) is intended to allow for Portal specific CSS changes.

A possible complicating factor is DNN supports a Client Dependency Framework (aka Client Resource Management) that combines and minifies CSS and JS files in order to speed page load times. This can be enabled/disabled at either the host level or the portal level. If you do a view source and see that CSS files look something like this: /DependencyHandler.axd/8e6a5ed8a16e4e54b409bfe3ab6ca767.5.css then CDF is enabled.

If you're looking to do something besides CSS changes, then we'd need to know what Navigation system is being used and how it's configured. There's now one primary navigation system, the DDRMenu, but it can have a wide variety of MenuStyles/Templates. It would be defined in the skin in a line like this: