If you haven't noticed yet, since Thursday of this week all of the skins from the skinning contest have been available for download. Previously, I discussed how much more time consuming this was than I thought it would be. Although it still took almost two more weeks to wrap it all up (there were other things going on too) I am pretty happy with the outcome. The end result of the skinning contest (voting aside) is 25 skin & container packages available for the community as well as 1 widget and 5 new skin objects.
In addition to this we also hope the 19 participants will join us over on CodePlex to maintain the skins for many releases to come. I haven't had time yet to reach out to everyone but those I have reached out to thus far are on board. I also have seen some forum discussions going on and a blog series on creating a contest entry by Ralph Williams (he did Reasonable and I find the title of the blog to be great. Thanks Ralph for the contest entry, good sense of humor as well as the blog series.). I have a couple of blog posts I started writing around using Tortoise SVN and CodePlex as well as why we packaged the skins, containers and skin objects the way we did that (I will be publishing both over the course of the next week).
One last thing I wanted to note was a few usability issues that people might come across if installing multiple skin packages from the contest. This will typically occur when you install multiple skins from the same designers (because they tend to use the same third party skin objects in their skins/containers). This is NOT an error and is displayed as a warning in the installer. It only happens when you install a package that contains a skin object. This is because the skin object must be installed prior to the skin being installed (and sometimes the container). It basically says that you have the existing version installed of the skin object but you can accept that and move on. If, at any point in the process, you are confused you can go on over to the DNN Extension manager and view the particular extension the installer was trying to install (the first one in the .dnn file if you view it in a text editor).
Please note, if you install any two skins that have the same skin objects you will see what I discussed above. The packages that have this potential are the following (any two using the same skin object):
- City, Dawn, Dream, ModernBiz, Profound, Technology use DNNJDMenu.
- TR, Expression, Modern, Unravel use DNNRadMenu
- Modern, Unravel use DNNPanelBar
This could also occur if you previously installed the skin object by itself and attempted to install one of the skins (with the skin object in the package). In the future, I hope the installer can break down what is being installed in the user interface a bit better (for example, we only see the description and package details for the first package) but we had to package the skins with what was our best option today.