Adammer releases Greytness, a free DNN skin
Greytness, a DNN skin that is clean, simple, sleek, and FREE! (as in beer)
ArchitectX was such a huge success, we’ve been busy with custom skin development since its release in January 2008. Greytness is our way of giving back to the DNN community which has been a big part of our success.
About Greytness
As its name suggests, Greytness is a single color grey skin (more colors soon). It includes 18 containers which can be arranged with great flexibility in its 21 panes.
Greytness is written in valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, valid CSS level 3 code, and does not contain any tables.
Our commitment to Web Standards
Adammer is a W3C Contributing Supporter.
We hope Greytness will help developers create more DNN skins that comply with W3C, WAI, and Rehabilitation Act Section 508 standards.
Greytness is a clean, simple, and sleek skin that we encourage developers to use as a reference for techniques to create more standards compliant and accessible DNN skins.
Download at the Greytness Demo site
Creative Commons
Greytness by Adammer LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license is available at http://www.adammer.com/legal/eula/.
Adammer News, Design, DNN skins, DotNetNuke, W3C, WAI, Websites
Wow — Greytness is a nice and simple DNN skin with a professional look that’s lacking from most other “free” skin offers. Truth be told, I like this one even better than Arch-X. Thanks for the contribution to the DNN community, Adammer!
Thanks for the kind words mamlin. We hope to release additional features and colors soon. Feel free to let us know what you’d like to see in future releases.
Blogged a review here:
http://www.eguanasolutions.com/DNN_Blog/EntryID/44.aspx
The main “wish-list” item for me would be additional container types: “enclosed” containers to help offset content and “background-color” containers to allow use of light-colored fonts.
Good documentation, BTW — clean and simple.
Map of the worldwide Greytness downloads 24 hours after release. There’s no question DotNetNuke is global. http://bit.ly/Ns2VM
I am in the process of upgrading a website and Greytness (greyt kname) is just what I was looking for. I especially like the banner pane. I was able to put a rotating flash module into the pane to jazz the site up. I was wondering about one thing. Why did you put the login and logout at the bottom of the page? Even when it is at the top I have had people have trouble finding the login.
Hi Mike,
I’m happy Greytness was just what you were looking for. We’ve had a lot of positive feedback since its release.
It’s great you were able to put the banner panes to good use. We use them all the time to create unique User Interfaces from a single page layout.
Great question!
On Greytness, we put the login/logout and account links at the bottom of the page to reduce their visibility and free up space for other UI elements. On portals with large numbers of active users, I usually recommend adding the “Account Login” module visible only by “Unauthenticated Users” near the top of strategic pages (such as the home page). This creates a very visible Login element for the end user but once they’re logged in, it disappears and relinquishes valuable page real-estate.
You can create very dynamic and fluid UIs using DNN module permissions. Give it a shot. And thanks again for your feedback and kind words.
After researching and testing many DotNetNuke Skins and if you have a low budget I recommend the following free skin
Greytness by Adammer – http://skinsbyadammer.com/Default.aspx
I posted an entry on my blog to promote this skin at:
http://www.vessea.com/Blog/tabid/58/EntryId/27/Greytness-by-Adammer-Free-W3C-compliant-DotNetNuke-Skin.aspx
Greytness is Greyt, I installed it a week ago and my site never looked better. I am still in the procress of tweaking it. there are so many ways you can modify and customize it.
visit http://AutOrphan.com to see Greytness modified
Greytness Global Download map
http://skinsbyadammer.com/Greytness.aspx#DownloadMap
I’m new to DNN and installed your great skin. However I’m having an issue with the search. When I click the search icon the page posts back but doesn’t do anything. Do youhave any tips you can provide? Thanks again for the skin!
@ BBuff ,
It may be that DNN has yet to index your content. But more likely, you have inadvertently deleted the page that contains the “Search Results” module.
1) Create a new page titled “Search Results” if it doesn’t already exist.
2) Add a “Search Results” module to the page.
3) Make sure the page is visible to all users.
That should be all you need to get the DNN Search operational.
Thanks Adam! You’re a genius. The page already existed from the default install but didn’t contain a Search Results module. I really appreciate the help.
Thank you .I try many times.But still can’t make the menu Switch language.Thank you still
Hi Miao, Did you install the Apollo PageLocalization module?
@ Adam Humphrey
No, 50$ is almost my monthly living expenses.Maybe I can change the menu control to default and make it look like as the menu of Greytness2.But I consider it not a good habit to alter Other People’s Works…Maybe I can make a new skin by myself based on the default skin.By the way ,I can learn something about dnn.
Thank you for replying me
Please feel free to make any changes or modifications to the Greytness skin code. One of the main reasons we released this skin under the Creative Commons license was to give people a starting point for skin development. Also, a couple people who downloaded the skin have successfully modified it to re-enabled the default DNN menu as well.
You may want to check out http://www.dnndoneright.com/ Drop-in upgrade for SolPart and DNNMenu. Although it looks as though it also requires third-party localization modules.
Please let me know if you need anything else. Always glad to help!
Thank you very much.You are a very very very good person:)
Thank you for providing a free skin/container ‘Greatness’. I am a new DNN user and was looking for a skin to modify and to understand. Your contribution helps a lot for people like me who is trying to get their feet wet in skinning.
Love this skin!! 1 Problem I’m having when I login as host I cannot see the admin or host links … is that normal?
Hi Nathan,
Yes, we removed the Admin and Host menu items from the Greytness horizontal menu as they can now be accessed from the links in the top right corner of the control panel (using DNN 5.x).
I love using this skin! I use DNN for work and for my husband’s business, so I work with skins in various price points. I find that Greytness is superior to many of the paid skins – a clean template ready to let my content be the focus.
Great job, and thank you!
I wish DNN would adopt Greytness as their default skin. It is so good. Cleanly coded. Easy to modify. Fast and just seriously good-looking. Thanks for making it available under Creative Commons. I now use it as a starting point for all my new projects.
Adam,
Just a note to say I’ve used Greytness as a base for our club website – http://www.kartsportwellington.co.nz. There are still some other changes to tweak, but they will happen as I learn more about html etc.
Excellent skin and very kind developper.
Thanks !
It nearly killed my site when I tried to reorganize some pages using the admin ‘Pages’ module. I never was able to recover… Was able to recover by using another skin (by/from Nina…)
I liked it well enough to be back looking at your for-sale/professional skins. Looks like you do nice work. Let me know if you fix Greytness or guarantee Arch-X or elemento don’t have the same issues.
Hi Bob, Can you give me a little more detail about the problem you had with Greytness? This is the first I’ve heard about a potential problem using the Greytness skin on the Admin/Pages page.
Thanks.
@ Adam Humphrey
Sure can. I can send you a link so you can see it on my screen if need be, as well.
Pages could not go beyond two tiers; the third tier disappeared from the menus.
For simplicity call the main menu bar the ‘root’ hierarchy. There could only be one item [Home, for instance] in the ‘root’ level. I had to make peers of that one item sub-pages on the settings to have them appear as peers on the menu bar. Changes to ‘none specified’ using Settings would not be saved.
Using the ‘Pages’ function/module under Admin role got things so screwed up I had to punt totally; I had to load another skin to ‘recover’. This one you might have to see to believe.
There is a chance it is my site as I just went through a nightmare upgrade, which is why I went to Greytness to begin with… Other skins work OK, though.
Also, HOST and ADMIN menu items/dropdowns do not appear at all on the menu bar. I believe this to be the same problem as the ‘only one root item’ above, since they appear as ‘root’ items on the ‘Pages’ hierarchy.
@Bob, It sounds like something went awry with your upgrade. I have seen one other person who had an issues similar to this after an upgrade. It may be that the DNN database didn’t get upgraded appropriately for menu hierarchy. And since our skins use a custom SEO menu module, it’s important that the database have the correct data with regards to menu item hierarchy.
Perhaps you can try a fresh DNN install and Use the Export/Import Portal Template feature to get this issue resolved.
FYI: (Included to help you understand our menu structure but not a fix for the issues your having)
The Greytness skin is specifically designed to support 0-3 menu levels. 0 = top level, 1 = sub page(s), 2 = sub sub page(s), 3 = sub sub sub page(s)
Example:
Home (level 0)
…Page 1 (level 1)
……Page 2 (level 2)
………Page 3 (level 3)
…………Page 4 (level 4)
The menu will display levels 0-3 but not level 4. If you want to enable support for additional levels you will need to change the appropriate .ascx skin file. Look for the tag and change the Level property to something other than Level=”0-3″. You will also need to adjust the CSS to support the additional levels as well.
You should also notice the ExcludeTabs=”Admin,Host” in the tag. Greytness removed the Admin and Host menu items because they are no longer needed due to DNN 5.x displaying these links at the top of the page. They were just taking up space.
If you’re still having issues please use our contact form to open a support ticket.
@ Adam Humphrey
I believe you are correct. I have a fresh/virgin 5.5.1 site and installed Greytness and cannot duplicate the problem there.
Import/Export Portal is new to me. Will try.
@ Adam Humphrey
Correction: You were correct; right on the money. My db had some bonkers stuff in it. A couple of negative numbers for order and ‘gaps’ in levels (like a level 1 with its sub items as level 4). One had a 5 digit number in one field…
Thanks so much.
My NavMenu is not showing anymore. When I view the HTML source there is no rendering of the menu. I’m not sure what caused it to not show, but there has been no DNN upgrade to cause this. What else can I look for?
@ Dewey, The most likely cause is the removal of the skins HTML comment:
Adammer menu technology licensed through http://www.snapsis.comDue our licensing terms this HTML comment needs to be part of the *.ascx file in order to enable the NavMenu. Let me know if you’re still having problems with the NavMenu after adding the HTML comment back to the skin or if this fix worked for you.
@Adam Humphrey
That fixed it. Thanks, Adam.
GREYTNESS is a great skin and it looks like there is more to share about the menu template feature could you share this information with us as i think that all of us are interested to learn more about the menu customization feature using the template property
thanks very much for the professional free skin very clean and pro code
Greytness 2.5 and DNN 6 are a great combo. Nice job on the fixes.
I am new to the Greytness skin and new to DNN. I installed Greytness on my home page and the login/register code disappeared. I don’t want to go back to Dark Knight as I just LOVE the Greytness skin, but could you tell me what happened to the login/register when I changed the skin? I am assuming it has something to do with my login.aspx or something like that but don’t know.
Thank you for your help! LOVE the skin!
Hi Chris,
I’m happy you’re loving the Greytness Skin! The login and register links can be found in the right portion of the footer.
Please refer to this comment for an explanation of why we chose to put these links in that location.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions or need anything else.
@ Adam Humphrey
Well… that is ingenious! Great idea! I’m not sure I would have even thought to look down there! Yet another reason I simply love this skin!
Thanks so much for your quick reply! Looking forward to rolling out a fabulous DNN site!
Chris