So, installing the latest version of the DNN blog module? Getting excited because of everything metapost CE has to offer? Now you're going to need to tweak a few things to make it work right. Well, trust me, it's worth reading post just to learn 1 or 2 things on how to customize the appearance of your main blog listing page. This tutorial discusses how to customize the title font size and the vertical space between entries for the Blog 03.04.00 module, both settings able to be changed by editing the ViewBlog.ascx file that is found in DesktopModules\Blog within your DNN installation. The DNN Blog module's official forum page is here: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/92/scope/threads/Default.aspx.
The trick to a lot of is figuring out which CSS and ASCX files are determining the look and feel of the page. Then tweak the files according to your wild dreams of how you want your blog to look. HINT: Don't forget to check the files for your skin, as well as the files I suggest in this tutorial. Sometimes those files are bringing the styles to your page, and you might not need to do quite as much editing as you would think. I, for one, found that I had to get nitty gritty with the code just to get the font size of the blog entry titles to be correct, and to increase the spacing between entries. This obviously comes from the ASCX page (which I found after digging through the blog module's code files).
note: even though you can edit .ascx, .css, .html, etc. files by using notepad or another free text editor, in order to more easily edit code files, i find it best to use a full featured editor, such as microsoft's visual studio express, or some such software that allows you to see the code in color and therefore navigate your way around the code a bit easier.
GENERAL HINTS:
1) HINT: Assuming you have FTP access your dotnetnuke portal, go ahead and download everything from the DesktopModules\Blog folder to your local computer. It's always easier to edit your module's code if you have a local copy on hand.
2) Download and install Firefox, and if you already have it, go ahead and grab the Firebug extension for it. Once you have downloaded and installed the Firebug extension in Firefox, you can proceed to the next step. (you can use another tool of some kind, perhaps an IE plugin or otherwise, in order to review the CSS and HTML from directly within your browser. This is one of the most helpful tools you can have in order to truly figure out what's "going wrong" with your site when you have a problem.)
CHANGING THE LOOK AND FEEL
1) Changing the size of the title on each entry:
Open ViewBlog.ascx from the DesktopModules\Blog directory (which you should have downloaded). You simply need to add a font-size attribute to the
2) Changing the vertical space between entries.
This is simply a div to add vertical space between posts. By default, there is no space there. I included a very simple div like this:
{div style="height: 25px"}{/div}
However, if you're inexperienced with this type of stuff, you probably need a hand finding out just where to add this code. Oh, and change the # of pixels to suit your needs.
Add the sample line as in the picture below. In my ViewBlog.ascx file, I added the code on line 59 (a full-featured editor helps with line numbers).
Hey, if you have any questions, just post a reply here and I'll get back to you as soon as I can!
- Chad