Joe Audette over at mojoPortal, along with an every growing and uber friendly community, are delivering a continually progressive and top quality web application framework for web designers like me to create functional, and impressive .NET based CMS systems around. Creating mojoPortal skins is an enjoyable and rewarding task, resulting in some fantastically functional websites for clients.

We’ve created a few skins now and one of the main reasons we choose mojoPortal over many other CMS frameworks is for the layout flexibility it provides; you aren’t ever restricted to a one, two or even three column layout; with some clever coding by Joe you can create any layout you need on a page by page basis.

mojoPortal works by assigning dynamic classes to the content place holders on the page which allow this useful bit of functionality to, erm, function.

Joe’s article above sets out in simple terms how this all works, but one of the biggest issues for me when I was creating my first skins with mojoPortal was getting my head around all of these classes. I’d made a little table up which I just found in my notes, so I thought I’d share it:

Content in divLeft Content in divCenter Content in divRight Class Assigned To Center Column
Yes Yes No center-leftmargin
No Yes Yes center-rightmargin
Yes Yes Yes center-rightandleftmargins
No Yes No center-nomargins

Additionally, to quote Joe:

Also if divLeft or divRight have no content and no Menu, the Visible property of the div will be set to false, completely removing it from the markup.

I hope that helps in your creation of mojoPortal skins, it definitely helped me!

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