This Book Will Not Make You A Good Designer
One of the biggest stigmas that DotNetNuke lives with is the belief that an attractive web site and a DNN-based web site cannot be one in the same. Many people think that if your web site runs on DotNetNuke, then it will inherently look bad. This, of course, is a fallacy.
However, as soon as a web site owner takes the time to learn the ropes of constructing a custom DotNetNuke skin, they likely jump the gun and create a skin that ends up looking no better than a $20 skin off Snowcovered, or even the default DotNetNuke skin. This is due to one important detail that is continuously overlooked: skinning is mostly web design, and thus if you have no design skills, then taking the time to learn how to construct a skin is simply setting yourself up for disappointment. Anyone can learn to make a skin, but only someone with design experience can make a skin that is aesthetically pleasing.
So, with that in mind...
The Good Qualities Of This Book
I've found a lot of wrongful confusion and intimidation surrounding the topic of creating custom DotNetNuke skins. The process of skinning DotNetNuke is pretty straight forward. If you have clear instructions then there should be no confusion. What I love most about this book is that it shows you just how quick and easy it is to make your own skin. In Chapter two, the author steps you through creating a skin from scratch in "in record time," and proves to the reader that DotNetNuke skinning is not as hard as it seems. By the end of the second chapter, a reader with no programming experience can have a skin developing environment set up, and can have their very first skin created. Now I think that is pretty rad!
One observation that I have had about [PACKT] books is that they like to keep things simple. I think a lot of non-technical minded people can get bored quickly when they pick up a thick book that is full of technical jargon. In the case of explaining DotNetNuke skinning, very little technical jargon is required. The author of this book has recognized this fact, and has thusly kept with the idea of keeping the content simple. On the other hand, all of the essential steps of DotNetNuke skinning are covered in this book. So, I feel like I can hand this book to one of my designers and more or less know that they will be able to read through it and then begin making me beautiful skins.
Now for those of us that are already familiar with skinning DotNetNuke, we might wonder what is in this book for us. I will admit that experienced skinners will find the content in this book extremely light. However, I personally did pick up a few tidbits of knowledge and some clever ideas from the author. For instance, I learned that the style sheet editor in the DotNetNuke portal menu actually uses the portal.css file to populate all the empty selector tags it displays by default. I also read about alternative ways to go about performing different tasks in the skinning process.
Above all, I felt that the author brought to light several things that I had seen before in other DotNetNuke documentation, but never made the effort to think critically about. Reading this book made me reconsider how several of the skinning concepts fits into the overall process. I now have a more complete understanding of those concepts, and maybe because of that I will try to use them to a more full extend in the next skins I create.
The Maladies
Few books are perfect. This one isn't, you can be sure of it. I was expecting to learn some advanced skinning techniques, and to gain some deep understanding of the skinning process. But that's not what this book is all about. As I stated in the Qualities section of this post, this book is meant to be a quick and easy tutorial. So, you really can't criticize it for the lack of technical details.
That said, there are a few things that bugged the crap out of me. For one, this short 143 page book has almost 40 pages (chapter 7) of content that has nothing exclusively to do with DotNetNuke skinning. There is information varying from how to make rounded corners in Photoshop to where you can get free web design layouts on the Internet. It is really B-Roll material that makes me wonder if the book is really worth $34.99 USD.
I also wasn't very happy with the section on creating custom containers. The author gave good examples in most of the other sections, but when it came to the chapter on containers, he really fell short. I would have traded all 40 pages of chapter 7 for a page or two more giving me a better explanation and examples of container creation. The same can be said for the chapter on packaging and deploying of DotNetNuke skins. It is weak.
Why Don't You Get Your Skinning On
If you're new to DNN skinning all together, then I think this book might be a good place to start. You can grab a copy off Amazon.com by clicking here. Or, get it directly from the Packt web site.
And for those of us that are never satisfied with one source of knowledge, here are a few more resources to fulfil your information fetish:
Overall, what makes a good DotNetNuke skinner is good design skills. So if you try your hand at skinning DNN and your skin turns out looking like poop on a canvas — don't blame DotNetNuke. You either need to have good design skill yourself, or you need to budget the time to have a professional designer do the work for you.
I hope you've enjoyed my thoughts on the new book on DotNetNuke skinning. Please post information about good skinning resources if you know of any.