I was asked to change the colours of a skin which was using the default Red skin and felt that a talk, with level of speakers - around 60 of them travelling from all over the world, including Shaun Walker being a key note presenter, really deserved more than just a change in colour.

So, was given a free run to create something that would work, but it was a challenge picking up a somewhat well developed site with hundreds of html modules in there already.

What I did was take the http://www.ventrian.com articles module, and manipulate it, change the templates, remove some of the tokens and get most of the speakers and sessions running on two instances of the articles module.

I also used the very cool SuperSka Gallery - http://www.superska.net  - with a bit of ajax to show how DotNetNuke and ajax can work together, and while the project wasn't perfectly finished (time constraints on both sides) it has got some fantastic response and the registration double in a very short time.

I used the http://www.subzero-solutions.net Powerlinks module for the advertising banners on the right hand side of every page, which not only gave a nice transparency (set in the module settings) but allowed me to put in a description of each sponsor, visible by mousing over the image, and, it also provided clickthroughs of the image.  This module is also role based, so you can set images to be visible to different users.

I then did a bit of skinning, not much though on the forums - I think they are still a bit 'in ya face' red, but hey time, time, time - it gets you every step of the way.

I noticed the pages were quite heavy to load - in fact, initially the site was 650kb - every page, with the photos and ads, but I tried to optimise the images and added John Mitchell's http://www.snapsis.com page blaster  - it was amazing to see the changes. 

I used the XFlex - http://www.skinsforsale.com/xflex  text and page resizer - it was good for testing but can see on the forums and some other places, it needs tweaking, but actually holds together well in Opera and Firefox which was good.  I've noticed the rendering of text in different browsers certainly is different.

It was interesting to take a job that already had so much depth to it and work around it, and David Walker who is managing the whole shebang really didn't sleep for some time as he was instructed on what he had to do using the *use existing modules* function to tie in as much of the site together as possible.

What I did enjoy was being able to do some solid testing on some of these modules and find out what works with what, and how, when modules are using the 'module settings' option to add further enhancements, a *set by default* function would really help. 

What I was really happy with was working with the UDT to display the agenda - which I didn't have time to make fancy containers, but it has a good representation of the module in action, and what I did to finish it off was to create a pdf file of the agenda, including modifying the tables, adding a header so you have a three page printed layout with the site logo in the PDF file.

And I create a simple 640px header and table with border and padding and left visible for administrators only as a master template to use for the newsletter to create consistency.

I feel the site looks much better, works faster, and is a huge improvement on what it was and next year, based on the feedback so far, will be even better!

So, if you're in or near Tulsa - check out the site, it's free - http://www.tulsatechfest.com with support from a range of businesses and companies which we of course need to thank to help make events like this happen and provide first class tools and information to the developers who, in turn, do some amazing things with code.

Who knows - I might be in the US on holidays next year at that time..

There is a DotNetNuke track, and John Mitchell and Chris Hammond - both core team members will also be presenting a talk.

Cheers -

Nina Meiers