Chapter 5. Packaging, Installing, and Applying Skins to a Live DNN Instance

Much of the last chapter was spent in the trenches so to speak, organizing, preparing, and coding all of the necessary files required for the MBR Design skins. However, let's not get too excited—not yet anyway. There's more to do before the skins can be applied—they need to be packaged. Packaging is the process of grouping all HTML-based skin and container files into a single "skinname.zip" file that can easily be uploaded and installed on a DNN instance.

There are a couple of reasons for packaging HTML-based skin and container files. First, a Zip file is required by DNN for installation. As I explained in Chapter 4, when an HTML-based DNN skin package is installed, DNN parses the files and generates ASCX files on-the-fly. These ASCX files are the files DNN uses to display the front-end of a DNN website. If you are working with ASCX skin files instead of HTML files, it is possible to simply upload ASCX-based skin and container files via FTP (File Transfer Protocol) because ASCX files don't have to be parsed by DNN before they become usable. However, because you are using HTML-based skin and container files, and because it is a requirement, you need to package them.