Dotnetnuke 5 User's Guide get your website up and running excerpt 4

Host skin

The host skin option allows you to choose the primary skin that a dnn instance will use. by choosing either the host or site radio button, you will populate the drop-down list with skins. skins at the host level are available to all websites within a dnn instance, whereas skins installed at the site level will be available only for the individual portal. we will look at skin installation in Chapter 4. for now, you won't have any skins installed other than the four skins provided by default from the dnn installation (see Figure 3-15 ). the preview link next to the drop-down list will take you to a page previewing the skin selected in the dropdown list. A quick tip regarding the preview mode; this does not save your changes. you still need to change your settings by clicking on update at the bottom of the host settings page to save the skin change, or any other changes you 've ve made to the page.

 

Seo-Search Engine Optimization

Throughout the book, we will mention the term ''search engine optimization, ''otherwise known as Seo. seo is the theory and process of optimizing the content of your web pages and website for better indexing by the various search engines, such as Google, Microsoft's live search, and Yahoo! This is done to try to make your pages show up higher in the search result listings, thus driving more traffic to your site. seo is an art of its own, but we will try to point out elements within dnn that can assist you with better optimizing your website for the search engines.

 

Portal skin

The portal skin setting defines the default skin that your portal will use. defining the default portal skin is an important part of the configuration process, as this is the skin that will be used on all pages of your website that don't have their own skin defined in the page settings. (page settings are discussed later in this chapter .) you shoshould choose the most common skin that pages on your site shocould use. this will allow you to save on the amount of work necessary because you won't have to configure most pages on your site manually, only the skin settings for pages that don't use the portal skin.

 

Portal container

The portal container setting defines the default container that the modules on your portal will use.

This setting will apply to all modules on your site, although you can override this setting in a couple of places. on individual pages, in the page settings, you can set a default container for the page; this wowould override the default container from the site settings. for individual modules on a page, you can also override the container in the Module Settings. we will cover Module Settings later in this chapter.

 

Edit skin

The Edit skin setting is definitely one of the most misunderstood options in dnn. in previous versions of dnn, this setting was called the admin skin. although the name has changed, the functionality provided is still the same. to understand this, first consider how dnn handles and loads modules. in most cases, dnn will load multiple modules on a page, either into a single pane or into multiple panes. every module has a view control, the default interface that users will see when they load a page that has the module on it. most modules will also have a settings control, in which you can configure the settings for the module, as well as an edit control, in which you can interact with the content/functionality that the module provides. when you edit the module or go to the settings for a module, dnn will load only that participant control on the page. you will notice when you do this that all the other modules that were on the page go away. you can tell when your dnn site is loading an individual control by looking at the URL of the page; you will likely see ''ctl ''in the URL. for example, in the default configuration, dnn will load the login

Control Using this functionality when you click on the login link on your page. When we are on our home page, if we click on the login link, we get a URL of the following format:

Http: // dnnbook/home/Tabid/38/CTL/login/default. aspx

Notice the/CTL/login/section of the URL. this is a query string parameter telling dotnetnuke to load the login control. you will notice similar functionality if you click on the Register link from your home page; dnn will load the register controls.

Http: // dnnbook/home/Tabid/38/CTL/register/default. aspx

The Edit and settings functionality for modules, along with the login and register controls, are loaded in the edit skin, defined with the edit skin setting. in container cases, having the edit skin and the portal skin be the same is perfectly acceptable, although in other cases you might find that you want a cleaner, more concise (less graphics, panes, etc .) skin when you are editing or changing the settings for a module. you will also see this edit skin when you add/edit pages within dnn later in this chapter.

 

Edit container

The Edit container, like the edit skin, is used in the case where dnn is loading only a participant control. in most cases, this is only something administrators will see; however, as we 've pointed out with the login and register links, it is possible that other users will see this container as well.

 

Logo directory

The logo in appearance is stored in the E:/webroot/dnndemo/Portals/0 folder. Even if we upload a local file as the Website Logo, it will first copy the file to E: download/webroot/dnndemo/Portals/0 as the logo.

 

Home Directory

The Home Directory option is not a setting you can configure after the creation of a dnn portal, but it is something you can change during the portal-creation process. for your purposes, the home directory setting tells you where the files for this individual portal exist, from the root of your dotnetnuke folder. in chapter 2, we created our dnn site in this directory:

C:/inetpub/wwwroot/dotnetnuke/

The Home Directory shows our portal's directory is in portals/0/, which equates to the Local Web server path of: C:/inetpub/wwwroot/dotnetnuke/Portals/0/