Well, now... That was a major effort for what looks like a minor change. I now have most of the public pages running on a new page design. It doesn't look all that much different than it did before, but the process of making the change was a highly effective learning experience.

I feel much more comfortable now with asp.net inheritance and CS's implementation of it. One most helpful step was to modify Web.config (after saving a good copy, of course) to make it generate more complete error messages. The process of doing that is explained in the brief error message that was appearing before I made the change.

There's still plenty more to do with the new design, but making the changes I did to the CS Basic theme showed me how the system is working, and also resulted in a cleaner code page than was generated with the old page based on a prior CS version.

I am, however, going to have to add in a table since I can't get Firefox to expand the containing div that should provide a white background for everything. IE 6 and Opera both expand the div, but -- despite trying several kludges on this page -- I can't get FireFox to work as I'd expect it to work. (And, yes... I understand that, for W3C activists, FireFox probably does things the way W3C wants them to do it. But W3C's box model is a dreadful design as all the pages detailing its failures attest. Implementing a dreadful design "correctly" is hardly a wise move.)

I'll enclose the whole set of master.Master divs into an otherwise empty table for the sake of FireFox and whatever older browsers follow its "lead". That will allow me to color the background to get rid of some of the sea of white.

A couple of many todos:

• Change the home-page "feature boxes" on the home page to a control copied from the ad controls. That will allow me to put it on other pages. (Probably the post.aspx page, among others.) It's also better to get it away from an editable control since those use "tiny mce" as an editor. Unfortunately, that editor generates truly validity-breaking html code.
• Change the menus to something more appealing. (Probably a rainbow-flag colored line for each section.)
• [Still -- one of the first tasks I identified, but still haven't completed:] Make the individual blog menu items become highlighted when chosen. I now see what I think will be a simple method to do that: On blogs.Master, add a bit of code to pick up the blog name (there's GetString() method on the relevant control that will do that). Add that name (as variable) to a CSControl:SelectedNavigation statement.
  I'm not sure, but I think it will be possible to use a variable in the control as long as it's within a server-side code block. I just need to look through the existing files to figure out where to put the code block.
• Use an image for the name of each individual blog. The same GetString() method used in the task above can be used for this. Although I could use a resource-file entry for the image url, I think it will be better to use a style-sheet definition for each blog. The style would bring in the image file (as background) and set the blog home-page url.)
  This should be done either in blogs.Master or theme.Master (not sure yet).
• Oh, yes: And write some goddam blog entries for Qblog so it doesn't all become a worthless exercize once it's ready for release.