Packt is pleased to announce the release of its new book DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial which will help users to create and design skins for their websites. Written by Darren Neese, this book is a practical guide to the fundamentals of skinning.

DotNetNuke is an open-source web application framework written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. The application's content management system is extensible and customizable through the use of skins and modules, and it can be used to create, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and websites.

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

As a user of Drupal, let me start by saying thank you to all the developers and advocates that brought Drupal 6 to light. I've been watching Drupal 6 grow from a distance this past year and have made some observations. There is a lot more sweat, tears, and love put into Drupal than most outsiders realize. Those of us that have used Drupal during the past six years owe a lot to those of you active in the Drupal community.

You can check out the release announcement at Drupal.org for all the new features and enhancements that have been rolled into Drupal 6. Let's look at some of the highlighted features in Drupal 6 which I've listed below.

"As Chameleon nears another release, we are asking for your
help! We are looking for contributions of theme elements (called
stylepacks) to be included in future releases of Chameleon! Don't
delay! Contribute your style code today! Read on for more details..."

"Intended Audience

This article has web designers, developers, and anyone who has http://www.csszengarden.com in their bookmarks, firmly in its sights. We want to bring your fabulous skills to a fabulous web content management platform: Drupal.

Drupal has never suffered from having too many professional designers offering Drupal themes. This shortage has intensified as the use of Drupal has grown. Good looking themes go a long way towards raising Drupal’s profile, and supporting that growth. Take a squiz at our presentation on Drupal theming, and jump into the "great Drupal great themes" postitive feedback loop!"

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"For Serendipity, only the frontend (what the visitors see) could be subject to Smarty-Templating. One reason for not utilizing these features in the backend was to maintain stability, ease of change for core developers and reduce migration woes so that the Admin Backend would always be accessible.

What we have now added to the Serendipity 1.2 snapshots (that will soon become public beta and a final release in late Summer) is functionality that allows you to template the backend layout as well as the 'New/Edit Entry' screen."

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Kshipra Singh from Packt Publishing sent me an e-mail the other day asking us to publish another one of their sample chapters here at CMS Report.   If you recall, we posted an article on one of the sample chapters from a book on Alfresco.  The book this time around is Mastering TypoScript: TYPO3 Website, Template, and Extension Development.  Long name for a title so why don't we dig a little deeper and find out what this book is really about.

TypoScript is a declarative programming language that offers developers, administrators, and designers full control over the configuration of TYPO3 and its template engine. Only with a good command of TypoScript can you leverage the powerful capabilities of the TYPO3 engine, to customize and control all aspects of your TYPO3 sites. If you're serious about TYPO3 as your content platform, you need to master TypoScript.

As before, I don't have the book in front of me and this should not be considered a review of the book.  Instead, I'm only allowing Packt Publishing through this post to give you a taste of what the book has to offer.  You need to decide for yourself if you want to buy the book.  The following is what the book intends for the reader to learn:

This is a busy week for me with an all-day software load scheduled this week for my work's operational systems.  Translation...you likely will not see many original posts from me for a few days.  I will however continue to post some links and excerpts  on CMS news items that catch my attention.

The good news, it looks like the layout issues with the Drupal theme I'm using, Zen, are finally being resolved.  The layout issues were with how the theme displayed in Internet Explorer 6.  No one has had time to patch and commit the changes into a new version for the theme but that will come soon.  Personally, I'll be glad when all the IE 6 users upgrade to IE7.  Yes, IE7 has a few issues but at least it is much more compliant to "standards" than IE6.  Either way, with the IE6 layout issues resolved, I can finally start making some real changes to this theme to make it much more my own.   Cheers!

"Creating a new skin in mojoPortal is just a matter of copying an existing skin and modifying it to your satisfaction. You should pick an existing skin with a layout closest to what you are looking for rather than based on colors as colors can be changed very easily while CSS positioning and layout is trickier business. You can, of course, layout things in any way supported by CSS but more CSS knowledge is required to do good layout than is needed for color scheme changes."

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