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DotNetNuke 5.0 Pane Previews

Oct02

DotNetNuke-Installer-Graphic DotNetNuke 5.0 has changed the way that the page administrator edit mode works. In previous versions of DotNetNuke, when you were in “edit” mode, the page would display the content inside of the various panes on the page. This made it possible to see the panes when you were ready to place a new module on the page. The downside to this behavior was that the pane borders and pane titles often caused problems with the skin. For power users and administrators who were logged into the site, this was problematic since they would were often displayed a substandard rendering of the site.

Panes

With DNN 5.0, pane titles and borders are no longer shown in edit mode. This allows administrators and power users to have a more pleasant experience. The video below shows the new behavior and how it aids in module placement without the side-effect of breaking the visual appearance of the page.

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2d6c115d-2692-446f-b701-03800181837d|4|4.3

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Comments

October 2. 2008 13:58

Thanks. That works for me. It seems like you guys are fixing the rigth things in the right way.

Could you work a little on the country's financial woes?

Michael Jackson

October 2. 2008 14:44

Looks good to me. How easy will upgrade to 5.0 be?

Jeff Martin

October 2. 2008 15:31

Personally, I like this, but what happens if a bunch of panes are below the fold?

Is there a way to turn this feature off and keep the old functionality?

I worry about training new users on a site where there may be, say, three different skins, with different pane structures below the fold that they'll have to keep track of.

Busse

October 3. 2008 03:01

This is a great functionality, and a nice use of jQuery.

Peter Schotman

October 5. 2008 14:08

Hey Joe,

In flow layouts where divs are used for layout instead of tables, we always add a second style to panes called NoPaneBorder, then change the layout of the pane titles to make them appear as a header to give users the same WYSIWYG experience of being able to see where the panes are. Here are the rules we define in our skin.css:

.NoPaneBorder{border:0px !important;}
.NoPaneBorder span.SubHead center{background-color:#efefef;border: 2px solid #e9e9e9;color:#000000;margin:1px;padding:2px;}

<shamelessPlug>I'm going to cover how we deal with this in depth in the skinning chapter of the new DotNetNuke 5 book from Wrox that I'm working on now.</shamelessPlug> I'm also going to post a blog on this in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for the video - that's a nice touch!

Best,

Ryan Morgan
www.ArrowNuke.com

Ryan Morgan

October 5. 2008 19:21

You said the feature isn't necessary in Layout mode but I disagree. If anything, it makes the most sense there because then the user can see all of their panes and content at a glance, including a highlight of the currently selected pane. It doesn't make much sense to hide the contextual information from the user, leaving them to guess where the pane they want is, and what content is possibly surrounding it.

Great idea, excellent implementation of jQuery, but the usability of this feature is off the mark by a bit.

Joe Sak

October 6. 2008 05:14

@Joe - I originally had it in layout mode, but removed it because it seemed redundant. When in layout mode, every pane is already displayed with a title. I will go ahead and add it back in because as you said the extra contextual hint is still useful and doesn't hurt anything.

jbrinkman

October 6. 2008 09:32

It's nice to see that the borders will go away in edit mode. Those were so annoying. They would break the layout all the time, causing divs to shift down.

@jbrinkman I really appreciate that, I think it'll prove itself to be useful and pleasant.

Joe Sak

October 12. 2008 21:42

Looks like a great feature, I'm also curious of how it will behave when the panes are below the fold. But overall looks like a good feature that will certainly help... those dang borders always mess up designs and layouts. Looking forward to 5.0!

DotNetNuke Programmer

October 17. 2008 09:09

This feature is very nice, but it's better to have an option to turn of this feature because for an administrator it would be very easy to see and manipulate with modules in panes if he sees pane borders. But what I would prefer is thin borders for panes but bold borders (as they are in video presentation) when administrator select a pane in control panel.

r3xha

Comments are closed