Community Server 2007 Themes - Part 2
Master Pages
The initial intent of this post was to show diagrams of the Main, Blogs, Files, Forums, and Photos master pages in Community Server 2007 (in the style of this post). I find a visual representation of the page is very helpful to me so I took some time to investigate the layout of the pages and create diagrams. As I dug into the new master pages I found the main pages for the Blogs, etc. are not very interesting. Each page basically added the main content (such as the forum list) and a few items in the sidebar. These are all obvious looking at the rendered page. So I want to spend most of this post dedicated to the Main master page.
Main
Changing my diagram from CS 2.1 to match CS 2007 results in the following:
The first thing to note is this is an ASP 2.0 Master page. Community Server is .Net 2.0 only, instead of allowing .Net 1.1 or 2.0 deployment like CS 2.1. Differences between the new and old seem to be minimal once you are past the use of ASP master pages instead of the custom master pages. The following image is a comparison of the two pages.
The change that sticks out in this comparison is the addition of a placeholder around the left and right content regions. Since CS 2007 allows for three different site layouts (3 column, 2 column with left for main content, 2 column with for main content), the other main changes to the main master page support this using the placeholders. Looking at this diagram it seems like there really isnt much change the body table is really only missing two <td> elements one for the right column and one for the left.But the real change is actually at the top of the file in the Page_Init method. It adds the missing <td> elements based on the configuration. One thing to note is that the left content renders above the right content when configured for either 2 column mode.
Blogs
Since the Blog main page wasn't very interesting, I went to look for an individual blog master page. What I found here wasn't entirely surprising. Each blog theme has a master page, and a whole set of styling information. The dynamic style aspx that I talked abut in my last post is used here as well.
The main difference in 2007 is in the number of files that need to be changed to create a theme - it looks like you can create a theme in 10-12 files including a preview image for the control panel and a print CSS. Ben Claims 8 files are all you need - I got my number from inspecting the distributed themes. My guess is this is a difference in number of files required to make a theme, and the number that make a theme with extra images, etc. Either way, it is still a huge decrease from the 55 that were a part of the theme in CS 2.1.