I still haven't had time to look into it. I plan to look into it but I can't make any promise that I can produce any result. It is on my to do list among many things. Any of you out there in the community who are good with CSS could also try working on this if you are enthusiastic to use Artisteer.  I do not even know if it is possible using their current product. I have it on my to do list to evaluate their product and try to see if it is extensible to do this but for all I know it is not.

Artisteer could probably make their product able to generate mojoPortal skins, but I imagine they choose what to work on based on demand and what they think will increase their product sales. There are lots more DNN installations out there than mojoPortal so it seems natural that they make their product support DNN to tap into a larger market. What we need is more mojoPortal users to petition Artisteer to make it support mojoPortal, if enough people request it maybe they will do it.

Best,

Joe

Wow, I'd never heard of Artisteer before, but what an amazing program. This really brings web design (almost) down to the level of a word processor, where the average person could really create a unique, attractive design for a site. For what it's worth, I put in a request at their site that they add support for mojoportal.

I've been working on mojoPortal skinning for a few weeks now, so as a learning exercise I created a test Artisteer HTML skin and tried to convert it for mojoPortal use. The first thing I realized is that with mojoPortal we are limited to using the 3-column layout in Artisteer. In addition to this, the names of all of the div IDs and classes are hardcoded in mojoPortal, so I came up with an initial set of conversions:

#art-main -> .pagebody

.art-Sheet -> #wrapwebsite
.art-Header -> #wrapheader
.art-Header-jpeg -> #wrapheader
.art-nav -> #menu-container
.art-contentLayout -> #wrapcenter
.art-Footer -> #wrapfooter

.art-sidebar1 -> .leftside
.art-sidebar2 -> .rightside
.art-content -> .center-rightandleftmargins
.art-content-sidebar1 -> .center-leftmargin
.art-content-sidebar2 -> .center-rightmargin
.art-content-wide -> .center-nomargins
 

After converting the div names in the generated Artisteer CSS, I almost had something worth looking at, although it was missing some of the "flair".

The final, insurmountable problem I ran into is that Artisteer outputs many more containing divs than mojoPortal supports. These divs are required to style many of the whiz-bang effects that make Artisteer so compelling. Just for one example, "art-Sheet-tl", "art-Sheet-tr", etc. are needed for the site to background transition effects.

Joe, I know you have your hands full for the foreseeable future, but I really think it would be worth somehow modifying (or extending) the skinning in mojoPortal to allow the use of tools like this one. Maybe there could be some sort of tool that visually designs and outputs a layout.master with a companion file that mojoPortal can use to know what divs are available?

Excellent news Joe! I know you've said in the past that "if something's beautiful in mojoPortal, chances are someone else did it." After playing around with Artisteer, I have a feeling that if you can get this working, you may just end up removing a good chunk of your delivered 3rd party skins and creating some originals of your own to replace them. I suspect that in the long run that would lower your skinning workload quite a bit!

I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all comes together!

Jamie

Wow Joe, that's great progress already! This is going to open up mojoPortal skinning like crazy.

Maybe you'll be able to get Artisteer to cross-promote mojoPortal once the new release is ready. That would be aweome.

Jamie

The Feed Manager CSS needs an additional rule in case the module is placed in either the right or left column:

stylefeedmanager.css

.rightside .rssnavright, .leftside .rssnavright,
.rightside .rssnavleft, .leftside .rssnavleft,
.rightside .rsscenter-rightnav,
.rightside .rsscenter-leftnav,
.leftside .rsscenter-rightnav,
.leftside .rsscenter-leftnav{
  width: 215px;
}

I am loving the Artisteer support! I think it will definitely help mojoPortal's popularity!

Later,
Joe D.

Hi Jamie,

I'm sure that is probably true of other mojoPortal skins. I do not consider it a bug if people create strange layouts. Typically one should always use center and side columns just supplement center, there is no reason to use side panes without center.

I'm uploading the release now, I just created this document: http://www.mojoportal.com/creating-skins-from-artisteer-html-templates.aspx

and will be blogging the release announcement as soon as I finish uploading files.

Best,

Joe

Hey Joe, thanks for clarification about the right pane positioning. Makes sense. Your article looks good too. Simplicity itself! I'm excited to try it all out.

Also, have you by chance checked out Artisteer 2.4 beta? They're adding vertical menu styling support, so when 2.4 is released, maybe you'll be able to find a way to use that generated CSS for styling the treeview menu? That would be good for us, since our folks prefer mojoPortal's "traditional" combination of a horizontal and vertical menu over the cascading type of drop-down horizontal menu in Artisteer 2.3.

Jamie

Okay, one last thing (hopefully)... I've updated my source from SVN, but in Web/Data/skins, instead of artisteer-greenlagoon, I have artisteer-7greenk, and I'm missing artisteer-swirly1. Do you need to do another source trunk commit, or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!

Jamie

Oh, that's no problem at all, I obviously need to work on my patience.  Thanks once again for everything.

When we buy Artisteer, we'll be sure to click through your affiliate link!

Jamie

Hi,

I don't know about that class, what version of Artisteer?

In any case you can freely edit layout.master and just add it if you need it.

Hope it helps,

Joe

I've been working on Artisteer 2.4 support and have it working with one skin you can see on demo.mojoportal.com, the skin is artisteer-24vertical1

The biggest problem is that Artisteer changed their css classes to lower case and since css classes are case sensitive it is equivalent to just changing them completely. So I had to add a setting in theme.skin for using lower case Artisteer classes in order to keep the skins made with Artisteer 2.3 working. But it means also that it is not possible to use artisteer-greenlagoon or artisteer-swirly1 for the start of a new skin for Artisteer 2.4 templates because those skins have the mixed case classes whereas designs generated with Artisteer 2.4 have all lower case CSS classes. So, I will have to make several variations of skins from Artisteer 2.4 to use as starting points for users to create new skins from Artisteer 2.4 and I will have to update the documentation. 

I was really expecting the Artisteer vertical menu support to be something like the flyout menu they use for horizontal menus, but it seems in their designs the vertical menu is often used in conjunction with a horizontal menu and has duplicate links. It doesn't seem that great to use only a vertical menu. I've made it possible to use it in several configurations that I will document, so it can be a duplicate of the main menu or it can be the main menu or it can be a sub menu. In artisteer-24vertical1 skin I made it a sub menu so it shows child pages of the parent page in the horizontal menu.

Best,

Joe

Hi Lars,

It did require changes in mojoPortal, so I will have to make a new release of mojoPortal for the 2.4 release of Artisteer, mojoPortal 2.3.3.9 only works with Artisteer 2.3.

I will make a new release of mojoPortal available as soon as Artisteer 2.4 final version is released or possibly sooner.

Best,

Joe

No way Lars!!!

I love Artisteer and I'll be the first to DL MojoPortal with Artisteer 2.4 support.

Hi All,

If you are using MS SQL and would like to help test our support for Artisteer 2.4, you can download mojoportal-2-3-4-0-preview-mssql-deploymentfiles.zip from our Novell Forge download page. I've updated our documentation for Artisteer 2.4 as well: http://www.mojoportal.com/creating-skins-from-artisteer-html-templates.aspx

I've added 5 new skins which can be used as the starting point for Artisteer 2.4 designs as mentioned in the updated document.

You can upgrade to this preview build, and will be able to upgrade from this preview build to the next official release, I am running the latest version on this site and demo.mojoportal.com already.

Please let me know any issues or feedback with using Artisteer 2.4 or any feedback to improve the documentation.

Thanks,

Joe

Hey Joe, I just wanted to chime in that I was finally able to compile from the latest SVN source and play with Artisteer 2.4 yesterday. I created a new horizontal + vertical menu Artisteer site design from scratch (including a custom foreground header image), overlayed it on a copy of the artisteer-24verticalmenu1 skin, tweaked the CSS to fix about a half-dozen minor issues, and the resulting skin fits our development content (200+ pages and counting) like a glove. Most amazing of all, the entire process start to finish took less than 60 minutes!

Two big thumbs up, as always!

Jamie

Excellent! Very glad to hear that it is working well. Thanks all who have tested so far!

Jamie,

You are right, that a 1000px sheet does have a slight horizontal scroll at 1024x768. However, it seems that Artisteer 2.4 uses percents for column widths so it should be less of a problem using a design with a different sheet width than our included skins than it was in Artisteer 2.3.

In my google analytics I see only 11.29% of visitors on this site have screen reolution of 1024x768 and the remaining 89.31 % of visitors have wider screens. Of course we do have a tech audience and that audience may tend to have larger screens than non tech users.

Best,

Joe

Hi Joe, I found one issue so far when working from artisteer-24-verticalmenu1 in trunk build 2.3.4.1 today: layout.Master has a div with a class of "art-Header-png", while the output from Artisteer 2.4 includes markup for "div.art-header-png". The symptom was that my header was being shown with "extra white space" around it. A simple fix in my new layout.Master once I was able to zero in on the problem with Firebug.

You may want to modify that layout.Master and corresponding CSS, assuming that art-header-png is the proper name that Artisteer 2.4 puts out. Jeez, I would certainly hope that Artisteer 2.4 is putting out consistently-cased CSS each time it exports!

Why oh why did the W3C decide that case-sensitive CSS selectors were a good idea? IMO, case sensitivity has no place in coding. It just sows confusion.

Thanks, as always!

Jamie

Hi Lars, I'm actually using MySQL as well. In order to "join the party" on these prerelease mP versions, you just need to have Visual Studio 2008 and the ability to get the source and recompile from SVN. Since I'm using MySQL I had to change a few data references in the source code one time, and now I don't have to worry about the database when recompiling from source. You can peruse the mojoPortal developer documentation if you want to go this route. It's pretty simple to do your own builds, and then another level of complexity if you decide to develop your own custom features (especially if they need database access).

In any case, I have a feeling that it won't be too much longer until Joe releases version 2.3.4.1.

Jamie

Ok friends, I just released mojoPortal 2.3.4.1! Come and get it!

Thanks to all who tested and provided feedback, very much appreciated.

Best,

Joe