You can style most of those by overruling the CSS.
I just had a look at the input box for the journal.
I managed to style it by adding:

#journalEditor, .jcmt .cmteditarea{
    border:solid 1px #ddd;   
    border-radius:0;
    background:none;
    margin-bottom:1em;
    
}

#journalEditor #journalPlaceholder, .jcmt .cmteditarea .editorPlaceholder{
    padding-left:0;   
}

#journalEditor #tbar {
    right: 0;
}

With this result:

But I have to say, it uses absolute positioning to place the icons on the right instead of floats or flexbox, so making this really responsive is going to take a bit of work.

 

This is awesome input thank you.  Please let me know how I can improve the platform to make it more stylish and friendly.  Or if you can put down a PR I am sure it would get accepted as long as it doesn't break anything.  I don't think much with CSS can break as long as the original classes stay.  The login and registration form is something I am trying to understand how to get the popup and page modernized.

Those little hickups in the css like what you pointed out that make it hard to style DNN.  Create a PR or I can if you point it out here and find the time to improve upon what is learned along with solutions.  No one is going to do it, just who does it will make a huge help towards attracting more users to DNN.  It will only get as good as we make it to start for someone to get attracted to the platform. Which in turn creates more potential customers for those who support DNN and customizing it.  DNN 10 will be our first real community release in my mind as we are now given an opportunity to show our community support for the DNN community itself.

I am learning my way through the platform and I want to adjust things as I look at each page in the code I look at.  CSS is one thing that has been a challenge in DNN.  Even with paid support it only gets so far before it gets hard to set things.

I have just put in a PR for additional classes in Login so you can style things.  If there is anything that is annoying for making styles please point it out here.  DotNetNuke is on a pivot point right now and needs to get put on a correct coarse, and since it is 100% community driven now we as a community can use all the support we can get.  It takes time even to get back to this thread I am trying to resolve so many of my own issues with DNN.  I am now taking on what I can for CSS as I see the conflicts when trying to style myself.  I go nuts because I am a beginner but looking more at the code I can see more clearly what is going on and hopefully I can make some adjustments and submit as PR's to be accepted by the community.

Thanks again for that input that is HUGE for me because again I am fairly fresh with front end modern web designs... I need to catch up to speed here so any help is greatly appreciated.

Also www.dnndocs.com can use some tutorials and gaps filled in as well if anyone can help build that resource to help everyone out.

Cody,

Great you want to help out.
Please note that most likely changes that will have a visual impact might not be accepted on minore versions.
They would best be implemented in the next full version (like v10).

Please ping your related  PR's in this thread too :-)

Thanks, Timo

This is exactly what we are discussing now on GitHub

I will update this with link in a minute I am trying to cross reference this thread with an RFC issue request.

https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform/issues/3278

Issue #3278 which will relate to some other discussions we agreed we needed community to put together futher details so we can move forward.  I will do the work... tell me what to do and for you my community masters I will try my best to make this happen by version 10 which is exactly what my personal goal was.  To get this fixed by version 10 so it makes sense to everyone that is reading current how to tutorials on how to edit CSS for a site.  No need for any screwballs here and something that is documented at www.dnndocs.com for Dnn.Next to display how things work and should be a part of 10 so developers can get used to it and make adjustments fully by 11. 

I would personally love to see version 11 .Next or be on the way to introducing it.  A way to run either version you can choose is what I would like to research, however maybe a university that uses DNN can make some contributions now that it is non profit open source project.  I would love to see some fresh MIT student whoop something out that blows everyone away.  This is another topic...

TImo, Your input is awesome here and anyone elses for CSS transition is great ,we need it!  I want to apply this to all the modules DNN currently uses so the sooner the better because anything we cannot style currently needs fixed up and can use the new naming convention to do so, or the old one...