I finally decided to take the plunge and build something with DotNetNuke and threw it away in frustration. Theres a ton of documentation, but it doesnt tell you how to do simple things. And for an ASP.NET newbie, its all a bit too much actually.
Let me explain. All I need is 3 panes. A top horizontal menu, preferably a slim one, one left pane and one content pane. The root tabs need to appear horizontally and for whichever one is active, the left pane should show one level of subtabs. Clicking each option in the left subtab should then change the contents of the right hand side container pane. Is that soo difficult to do ?
I couldnt find a single skin in any of the free skins or even the for-sale skins in DNN that showed this. Cant blame the skin creators. There were some rather nifty ones on display but for my requirements they were pretty much useless. Its beginning to look like no one at all uses simple website structures anymore. Or perhaps the structuring requirement goes beyond anything to do with skins in DNN.
But I can do this easily in Rainbow (using the SubTabsVert theme).
Anyway, thats bye-bye DNN for me.
Maybe one day when i need a radical looking site with DHTML menu's all over the place i will look at it again. In the meanwhile, theres a Rainbow in the sky!!