Edit:

Oliver Hine has gone well beyond what my suggestions here are, if you have not tried his Control Panel, I recommend that you do.

Oliver Hine went through great effort to deliver an optimized ribbon bar for the DotNetNuke and it works great, it is a big improvement on the current offering. Here is a link, go get it: http://oliverhine.com/DotNetNuke/Administration/AdvancedControlPanel.aspx.

Above is a screen shot of what I think would be even better.  The whole control panel tucked into the “Mode: View-Edit-Layout area of the bar”. No need for the Expand/Collapse  Control Panel control.

I like the View-Edit-Layout radio buttons, they are obvious and easy to use.  You can go from one mode to the other with a single click and you can tell with a glance  what mode you are in.

Having spent several years with DNN, it occurs to me that content administrators don’t understand the control panel and how it is arranged.  As hard as it is to believe, they don’t understand the model of Page Functions, on the left, Module functions in the middle and Common tasks on the right.  What’s more, they don’t understand what modules are even for.  I think we could erase a lot of confusion by changing the wording and getting rid of some of the icons.

• After the “Mode” radio buttons, I would put “Settings” or better yet, “Page Settings”.  No icon required for this just plain text. 
• After that we could have a delete link for deleting a page.
• After that would be “Add a Page” and when you click on it you see the Add Page choices in a drop down.
• Next would be “Add content to page”.  When clicked you are presented with the add Module choices and when one is clicked, the add module popup is displayed.  This makes it obvious that modules are there for putting content onto a page.
• After that is “Common Tasks” which would be some common links that are already found in the Admin Menu.