Forum General DotNetN... Make it Hot! ( ... HELP! Lost admin & host screens

5/9/2008 12:01 PM

	dali2
10 posts

HELP! Lost admin & host screens

I am completely new to DNN and skinning, and in my first experience working with tweaking a skin, I made changes to the html & CSS of a skin... using only left and right panes. After I uploaded the new skin (whilst logged in as host) the drop down menu items for admin and host appear, but none of the pages come up. I suspect the content of these pages is all in the content pane, which I ignorantly removed from the html, hence nothing appears in those pages.

Since I would like to revert to the DNN-Blue default skin, but can't get to the menu to do so, I'm wondering how I might be able to do this easily without the page interface. Also, a child site of the portal is operating okay, so can I somehow affect the parent's skin via the child???

Additionally, none of the login options of the child sites work at all, now; either. I'm completely stuck in the mud! The error message on the children sites is:

A critical error has occurred.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I appreciate any assistance you can provide!

5/9/2008 2:44 PM

	Rhys
51 posts

Re: HELP! Lost admin & host screens

If you have FTP access to your server you can reach the skin files at ~/Portals/_default/skins/YourSkinName/. You could then temporarily add a content pane back in just to get yourself sorted.

When I create my own skins they're always just for my portals and I never bother doing the extra work to make sure they're suitable for the admin and host screens. I always configure my portals to use the DNN Blue skin for these screens.

If this doesn't help let us know and we'll come up with something else :)

Rhys

www.rmjcs.com - Mostly SQL Server Stuff

5/9/2008 5:21 PM

	dali2
10 posts

Re: HELP! Lost admin & host screens

Thank you. I guess this is part of the learning process: I'll certainly take your advice and not play with portal skins ever again!

Your suggestion has helped me to resolve one error; but now I'm still unable to login and I get the error message:

A critical error has occurred.
Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I think I caused this by attempting to clean up some of the preliminary skins I had uploaded during my learning process. I had applied the "winter" skin that I got from Chapter 3 of the DNN Skinning book, and after I modified the css and html files, I renamed the zip file winter1, winter2, etc. I kept the winter.css .htm and .xml names and I had gotten to winter4.zip when I began to clean up (from the ddn interface) the older skins. The problem is that I deleted the original winter skin from the interface side, and I think something is looking for (and not finding) it - even tho the skin upload page referenced winter4.

Is there some way to set the portal back to dnn-blue without using the skin interface? If so, then I can just use a child site to experiment and learn with.

Sorry for the lenghty explanation, and thanks for your help!

5/10/2008 2:22 AM

	Sebastian Leupold
13566 posts
www.deutschnetnuke.de

Re: HELP! Lost admin & host screens

usually any invalid skin will revert DNN back to dnnblue. remove all your extra skin folders inside

/portals/_default/Skins/[skinname]
/portals/[portalid]/Skins/[skinname]
/portals/_default/Containers/[skinname]
/portals/[portalid]/Containers/[skinname]

eventually you will need to restart app, to do so, edit web.config file with a texteditor, add a blank (" ") to first line and save file.

Sebastian Leupold

DotNetNuke Project UserDefinedTable
DotNetNuke Project Release Tracker

5/10/2008 9:44 AM

	dali2
10 posts

Re: HELP! Lost admin & host screens

Thanks for your help. I removed all references to my skins in all the directories listed above, backed up the web.config file and modified it, and now I get the following runtime error. I even backed out of the web.config file change and this error persists. I'm running DNN 4.7 online, and have been making the changes to my online portal. Also, the " " that you suggest making in the first line of web.config should look like: <configuration " "> or should the " " go somewhere else? Anyway, here's the latest error message that I'm now getting at the portal and all children levels. THANKS for any help you can provide.

Server Error in '/cd' Application.

Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".

<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <customErrors mode="Off"/>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.



<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
</system.web>
</configuration>

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