Bob,

You're almost there with the use of panes, although the type of thing you're looking for can be achieved using one skin, as empty panes are assigned a special css class and can therefore be set to hidden, so if you had the option of a three column or two column layout on a page and one wasn't used it could disappear from view.

The concept behind panes is that they are areas of the skin which content can be placed, so in effect they are empty blocks, and indeed when the [CONTENTPANE] is rendered through DNN it creates a <div id="dnn_nameofContentPane"></div> within which the modules are placed and you can have multiple panes per skin. The best place to look at this would be one of the skin.ascx files which you'll be able to find in the Portals/_default/Skins directory.

There's a skinning guide available here: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Support/Doc...

Regards,

Rick.

Bob,

It used to be the case that the panes were built using tables, so when one <td> wasn't occupied the other panes would expand to fill the space. With the tendancy to be for valid XHTML and div based designs now this is all handled through divs, and these tend not to expand to fill space as easily as tables do.

What you have written is correct, you can create an almost unlimited array of panes, I tend to build them one layout above the other, with a clearing div between them, so for instance I'll have a single column, followed by a triple column layout, clearing div, two colum layout, clearing div, and then a footer pane. I've included a sample of the code below.

<div id="dnn_ContentPane"></div>
<div class="clear"></div>
<div id="dnn_LeftMarginPane"></div>
<div id="dnn_InnerContentPane"></div>
<div id="dnn_RightMarginPane"></div>
<div class="clear"></div>
<div id="dnn_LeftHalfPane"></div>
<div id="dnn_RightHalfPane"></div>
<div class="clear"></div>
<div id="dnn_FooterPane"></div>

I'd then use CSS to float the 3 column and 2 column layouts the way I wanted and when you logged into DNN the various pane options would then be available to you and when you log out, any that are empty get assigned a class which you can set the display to none for.

I hope this makes sense, if not please let me know.

Regards,

Rick.