Tuesday, August 17, 2010

How to create a signle package for skin and container

In last week I've released a new skin Multiflex5 on OSDNNSKINS, which is having two packages in downloads section, one for skin and another for containers. When I visited the download page to make sure downloads are working fine, I noticed that skin package is having more downloads than container package's download. This is why this question comes to my head.

The Idea behind creating a single package is to make sure newbies can also install the package correctly, and when they evaluate the skin. So, I have decided to add two things:

1. Create single package for skin and containers.

2. Create a page template (or may be portal template not sure) that can be used to see the demo.

So, right now I'm going to discuss about how I have created a single package for skin and container. and you have to wait for next post to know how to create page template that can demonstrate the skin.

Before starting to manually do the following steps, I've tried finding if there is an automated way to do this, and already created a question in dnn skinning forum. Following are manual steps to merge two different skin and container packages to single one.

1. Create separate packages for skin and containers using Create Package Wizard.
2. Copy the packages from dnn's Install folder to a new folder.
3. Create a New folder called Package and paste all files of skins and containers to a package folder.
4. Make sure you don't have common name for any file in skin/container's package. Otherwise step 3 will overwrite it.
5. Open container's .dnn file and copy following section:
<package name="Multiflex5.4" type="Container" version="0.0.4">
...
</package>
6. Open .dnn file for skin and paste the it before </packages> tag.
7. Remove .dnn file for container
9. Press Cnrl + A to select all files, right click > Send To > Compressed (Zipped) folder
10. Rename the newly created Zip file to your desired name.
11. Test it by installing it to new instance of DNN (or change the skin and container names to install it to the existing installation)

Hope this will be helpful.

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