Logged in as Host / SuperUser - you can access these features under the Host / Skins area and start making changes to you skins in simple ways. I would expect in the future, more ammunition will be provided and is this going to be a designers friend or foe.... And how much will it be used anyway.

The concept is not bad when you think of how organised the tokens are, and within a dropdown menu refresh... refresh.... and refresh, you can see some things you can do to your site without opening up the skin at all.

You can get an insight on how the skin designers work and this example here shows how you can edit and change the words that are displayed in the standard output of Terms & Conditions - using the Terms Token.

Multi Faceted skinning allows you to controls specific elements of a token that might logically require updating.  For example, You can't change how the text in the Copyright Skin Token works because it's very output is in fact Text you put in the Site Settings page, so the only thing you can change is how it looks - hence, the Copyright Token allows you to change the CSS class or the 'look and feel' of the words.

But the Terms and Conditions Skin Token - [Terms] can have the text changed and the CSS class and this example below shows you how it's done.

Firstly - you need to select the skin package you want to make changes to, which will refresh and show the skins in the package - I noticed the container page also shows up - it's a bit confusing as the pages refresh, but as you keep drilling down you'll see there are options that appear, according to... [token] type -

In this example with the Terms and Conditions - I was able to change the display text on the default skin from Terms and Conditions to 'Our Company Terms'. That could be useful for last minute changes and such, but a couple of quirks I did notice, is that is only possible to change a skin folder level, not skin level.  I suppose it could be said that you would want the content to be consistent throughout, eg.. Our company terms should appear on all the pages, but I noticed that you can't reset the default settings back, nor can you parse the skin again, and bring back the standard settings or original skin settings.  I understand that perhaps with ascx files it might not have been parsed, but I would have thought that the reparsing of a skin would have brought it back to it's original format so it seems that it's a one way street to make changes in this release, unless between now and release date it's been changed.

I also thought, but haven't tried as yet, how will it affect those with custom menus. I see that you can't do anything with the menus yet and would assume that in time you will be able to, so while I appreciate that it has some cool features, I am yet to be convinced of it's virtues for the designer.

One thing I did like about it - was the ability to turn OFF those space hogging search features.  If nothing else, that is a winner.  You can do that now by clicking the 'search' token option of the skin and turning off the web search feature and clicking update - that's a great feature for those who have slick skin designs which broke with the new search feature we had to have.

THIS WORKS -  but  DON'T TRY TO REMOVE THE SEARCH WITHIN SITE FUNCTION - because at the point of writing this - trying to use it broke the dnn build - so I guess it's not quite ready for prime time but I'm sure on it's release, it will have been tested.... oh.. go on .. give it a try - and make it your live site... without a backup, during work hours... I dare you..

But you get the picture of what's coming - I will be waiting to see how the menu functionality will work.  It could be interesting to say the least.

Nina Meiers