Straight out of the box, DotNetNuke already has a lot of things covered. But, what do you do when you are ready to begin customizing your site. Sometimes, it’s not so easy to figure out how to make those changes. But, customizing your portal to fit your needs is actually pretty easy.
We’ve all seen them on every DotNetNuke portal out there. Talk about duplicate content! If you’re ready to make sure your site is different than all the others. Here’s how:There are actually two things you can make changes to. The first being the actual text of the link and the other the actual text on the page the link leads you to.First, let’s change the link text. All you have to do is add a “Text” attribute on the Privacy control located on your skin file. Save the file and refresh your page and Voila!
<dnn:PRIVACY
runat="server"
id="dnnPRIVACY"
CssClass="footer"
Text="My New Privacy Text Link"/>
Now, to change the text on the pages following the links, you have two options.
One method is to make the changes directly from the website. You must be logged in as the Host/Superuser accout. Under the Host Menu, click on “Languages”:
On the next screen, click on the “Edit Language Files” link.
*** Please note that whatever changes you make for the Privacy and Terms will affect all of the hosted portals. Under the “Global Resources”, you can look for the MESSAGE_PORTAL_PRIVACY.text box and make edits there. (MESSAGE_PORTAL_TERMS.Text to change the Terms of Use page)
Here is a copy of the text that I placed for the new page:
<div align="left">
<h1>My New Privacy Statement</h1><p>It's short, but it's to the point. [Portal:PortalName] cares about your privacy and you can <b>trust</b> me!</p>
<p>You can email <a mailto:[Portal:Email]>[Portal:Email]</a> with questions </div>Notice that HTML and tokens are acceptable. Also, notice how the link for the PortalEmail was formed so that it would be a clickable link: <a mailto:[Portal:Email]>[Portal:Email]</a>
Once you have made your changes, scroll to the bottom and save your changes and preview your new page:
The other option you have for editing resouces is my preferred method just because I don’t have to muck around online, but you can actually make the changes directly in your website files. Under your site directory, navigate to "App_GlobalResources” >> GlobalResources.resx. In Visual Studio, you will get a UI representation of the resource file. Scroll to the setting you want to change and make the modifications here. Th .resx file can also be viewed as an XML styled file as well
Here is the new rendered output after a local edit. Notice I used a new token here also: [User:Username]
I’m sure you’ve noticed by now that there is a great amount of information that you can change throughout the portal, both global and local changes can all be made like this.Alright, what are you waiting for….there’s so much to do now!