Of course, as in any relationship, the first enraptured flush of infatuation gives way to the more difficult part of building a solid relationship.

As often happens, the first problem for me came after meeting the "family". It can be tough figuring the family tree of inheritance, and forgetting a cousin's name can lead to problems.

So, yes... I've been getting the cold shoulder, as it were, as I try to go beyond the first stage this relationship with asp.net and CS.

I have the home page changed to a new theme based on the supplied CS "Basic" theme, but redone to look pretty much like the current home page which was based on the old "leanandgreen" theme. (I used that one to start with partly because I preferred the look, but also because it was easier to search & replace "leanandgreen" when I made a copy of the theme directory to customize. "Default", after all, is a dangerous title to assign to something like their default theme.) Although it looks similar, the new page generates cleaner CSS code. (Although I haven't yet been brave enough to run it through the WC3 validator.)

Starting with the Basic theme has also allowed me to identify more easily the classes in the default stylesheet that I'm using on the page.

The problem has come as I try to build a version of the theme that will work with the blogs. It's the inheritance issue. I'm getting something wrong with asp:ContentPlaceHolder and asp:Content..

Here are a couple of preliminary notes on what I'm finding (which might very well be all wrong) My new theme name is "seaqwa_css".

When the root file of a blog is chosen (eg. seaqwa.com/blogs/qblog), the file that runs is /themes/blogs/seaqwa_css/postlist.aspx. There's another postlist.aspx in the main theme directory. Not sure when that one runs.

This version of postlist has this family tree:

--

Inherits="CommunityServer.Blogs.Controls.CSBlogThemePage" MasterPageFile="blogs.Master"

I believe that means that it inherits from either /Themes/seaqwa_css/blogs/blogs.Master or /Themes/Blogs/seaqwa_css/theme.Master. I'm not sure which as I write this.

 /themes/seaqwa_css/blogs/blogs.Master inherits from /Themes/seaqwa_css/master.Master.

But there's also another master in the mix, namely /Themes/Blogs/seaqwa_css/theme.Master.

Somewhere in that mix, I'm getting a the content controls wrong. I'm in the process of blanking out all actual content on the page to see if I can track down the problem.

In the meantime, I think I'll switch the home page over to the new theme since I'm pretty sure that its master.Master and home.aspx are OK.

One of the wonderful things about Community Server is that it makes it simple to do this kind of switching on the fly. If it turns out that the new home page doesn't work, I can easily switch back to the existing one. And the blogs, in the meantime, will continue to run on the old theme until I've figured out what I'm doing wrong.