As I mentioned earlier, I jumped into Community Server before I'd taken the time that I had planned to devote to getting up to speed on the necessary background information. It's been a long time since I've done anything with .asp pages or IIS. (It was, in fact, only the first version of IIS that I worked with at all, back in the day a decade ago when I was at Microsoft.) I've been dealing only with Apache servers since then.

Along the way, I've avoided big pre-built systems like CS in favor of rolling my own pages in various ways. But I can say now working with the CS system for just over a week that I'm mightily impressed with what's offered here. But I also realize now that I made a mistake (one I suspected I was making, but a mistake nonetheless) in building as much of the site as I have without taking the time to plan things out. (But this is, of course, a bit of a dev catch-22, since one good way of learning about a technology is to jump into it to find out how much one doesn't know. But it's only with that knowledge under the belt is planning effective.)

Anyway, what I have now on the site isn't what I want to deal with in the long run. I now need to tear it all up and start over with something closer to what I want it to be in the end. I've found that the pages on MSDN about Sharepoint Server offer useful background for dealing with CS. (Just substitute "Community Server" for "Sharepoint Server" and recognize that Sharepoint-specific controls are different in CS.)

It's good background, for instance, on the page model used by both systems. This page, "How to: Create a Minimal Master Page" is helpful for CS along with "Page Layouts and Master Pages" and -- somewhat -- "Page Layout Model".

There's this bit of advice from the first of those pages:

Creating and completing a master page to begin your SharePoint site customization takes planning and time. If you can, you want to prevent having to rewrite or back out code you don't need in your master page. This topic shows you how to create a minimal master page that includes only the minimal functionality that Office SharePoint Server 2007 requires so that you have a stable platform upon which to build your own master pages. Creating a minimal master page can help you avoid the time-consuming process of backing code out of a pre-existing .master page such as BlueBand.master, or removing functionality and then building it back in when your customization needs change again.

Yeah. Well. OK. I didn't take the time to find that advice since I didn't know enough of what I was doing with CS and because CS provides such a superb UI for partially customizing pages. I got just far enough to realize I don't want the master page offered in the "theme" I'm using. (It uses tables for layout, see, and CSS nerds know that tables should not be used for layout.) Now, I'm faced with either starting from scratch or " time-consuming process of backing code out of a pre-existing .master page."

But at least I understand now what I have to do so that I can create a plan to do it. (And that's why the pros have architects, or dev managers. [That, and the need to produce all sorts of Powerpoints and pretty drawings and reports for business managers.])

[Later:] But, of course, the CS documentation says much the same thing with a recommendation to use the Basic theme as a starting point for customization. It's much cleaner and is mostly a CSS-based design rather than being table-based. I'm pretty sure that I'll be better off buidling off of this theme now that I know better how things work and what I want it all to look like.

Warning though: Since I haven't yet taken the time to create a workable dev platform for this, I'm going to break this semi-live version of the site more often than I have been as I make the switch. Fortunately, CS's nifty preview system will help me keep the nastyness to a minimum.