It seems that many DotNetNuke beginners have been reading the old skinning documentation, therefore, they’ve gotten the not-so-up-to-date information about navigation in DotNetNuke. Knowing that there are many people including myself have been talking about this topic in the forum in a while, but I wanted to put out this blog post so you can find it a bit easier since there are threads created in the forum every few minutes or so and it makes it harder to find.
Anyway, DotNetNuke introduced SolPartMenu a while back and the team upgraded the control with DNNNav (or DNNMenu) since version 3.x (if I’m not mistaken and please do correct me if I am). The new control has many changes to help speed up site performance by removing the table-based HTML rendering at the “root” level of the navigation along with many other improvements documented in this whitepaper.
I encourage anybody who are new to DotNetNuke or currently running a DotNetNuke web site that is using SolPartMenu to stay away from it and upgrade to the latest control to take full advantage of its functionality and performance of your site. SolPartMenu is no longer being supported or maintained as far as I concern.
If you feel like upgrading to the latest version of DotNetNuke (currently 5.1.4), you’ll see the major difference in the navigation webcontrol as I mentioned in my recent blog post. To learn more about changes to the most recent menu control, please refer to Jon Henning’s video at his blog post.
The latest skinning document posted by Timo a few months back and can be found here. This is a your skinning bible if you are a newbie. But even you’re a long time DotNetNuke veteran, it’s worth to take a quick look to know more about the skinning engine since it helps with module development.