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Creating skins for DotNetNuke is a real pain in the ass. Modifying someone else’s skins is a pain in some other parts – mostly the brain. The skinning engine for DNN is a powerful one and while a talented designer/programmer can create some pretty amazing and flexible designs, the trouble is that most people are not talented at BOTH design and programming at the same time. So unless you’re part of a big budget web design firm, you’re left to purchase a “store bought skin” from snowcovered or your favorite skin designer and then attempt to “tweak” their design to meet your specific needs.
We’ve probably purchased in the neighborhood of 25 skin packages from snowcovered over the years for various client projects. I often take the really well constructed skins and re-use them over and over, changing images and CSS and layouts enough to feel good about design variation.
All of this takes time. Lot’s of time and more often than not frustration as you chase CSS issues and layout problems to create even the more trivial of changes.
Enter Artisteer, a Windows Desktop application that can best be described as “MS Publisher meets DNN”.
Artisteer is the first and only Web design automation product that instantly creates fantastic looking, unique website templates and blog themes. (from Artisteer.com)
Always one to try and take steps out of the process I recently tested Artisteer 2.2 (then immediately bought a copy). Here’s why:
So far, dealing with Artisteer has been great. I purchase the application online for $130 USD through PayPal. Licensing was smooth and easy and I had the trial unlocked about ten minutes after my purchase.
You do have to install their menu module before their skins will work. No problem since SolPart is pretty bad and their menu is so flexible.
Support has been responsive and they are very open to product suggestions. (One of my ideas for the libraries was added to the roadmap – sweet)
Their forums are organized – but a little clunky to use. They seem to have a lot of Joomla and Drupal users to the DNN forum is a little light – but you can see more and more posts in their daily.
Most posts are answered by other users. I suspect Artisteer deals with support tickets for any “real” support issues from paying customers.
Artisteer does have it’s limitations in this release (first release with DNN support) Some of the limitations.
Here are two sites I created using Artisteer:
www.overlooktechnology.com (this site) created while experimenting with Artisteer. This is my first Aristeer skin. I’ve since gone back and tweaked it a few times and created a News Article template to work with Artisteer.
www.naturallyhortons.com is a freelance project for a friend. All I got was a business card with the colors, logo and chevron pattern. I finished the skin itself in under an hour. The rest of the site took about a half day.
I think the biggest thing I like about this application is that you can create really nice looking skins quickly and easily. More importantly, you can make tweaks quickly, see them in real time and upload your changes.
Basically it saves time and increases flexibility which should save your money (or increase your profits) and keep you and your clients smiling.
Steven T Webster - posted on Friday, September 25, 2009
Update: I reported the Hide Menu issue to Artisteer support. Within a couple of days they responded with a patch file for the ArtMenu that resolves the issue. I would assume this will be included in the next release.
Steven,Decided to get Artisteer as well....was really impressed with the ease of creating a simple skin that can be modified to your hearts content with CSS and a little coding :). Thanks for sharing.Here is one skin I put together tonight just playing around for my wife.http://www.compassnorthgroup.com/Home/tabid/161/Default.aspx
After uploading the template I get the following error message:Could Not Load Skin:/Portals/_default/Skins/Austral/page-admin.ascx Error:The File /Admin/Skins/styles.ascx does not existdoes anybody have any suggestions about how I can solve this error ?
What version of DNN? Also, I noticed your portal is _default instead of 0. Did you change this?
Hi Steven,You mentioned you created a News Article template to work with the Artisteer template.Would you mind sharing this template with me. I like to have an example of how this needs to be done.
I went through the package creation steps and it appears that the manifest file has been created, but the files were not zipped up into a package file? Were they supposed to be or am I supposed to zip them up using the zip file name i defined in the package wizard? I did not receive any errors.
Where can I find information on how to create a custom menu skin for the Q3 release.after upgrading from Q1 my custom skins don't work anymore.Telerik.Web.UI.RadMenu with ID='RadMenu1' was unable to find embedded skin with name 'MySkin'.
@Arie van Dalen, I have some tweaking to do before I share it. Thank for asking.@Jouer au poker gratis, when you export the skin make sure you choose "zipped" output. Otherwise it will create the folder structures only but won't be suitable for installation on a remote server. @ressources du casino, Artisteer uses their own menu. I would suggest posting in the Telerik forum. They have a very active community with good support.
I just wanna thank you for sharing your information and your site or blog this is simple but nice article I've ever seen i like it i learn something today.
While I agree with Artisteer being easy to make the skin, you have less room for further customization, ie menu and and moving some stuff aroundI believe learning to use css and xml seems to be best way, It take some time but will really pay off
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