Comfortable in my own skin...

First off, an apology for the whole 2 or 3 of you who are following this.. I haven't posted in over a month. I got pretty sick for a couple weeks and didn't feel like doing much.. In addition I've been working on my home office.. A place that isn't a computer on a folding table with a folding chair where I currently do all my work.

So I've had this internal dialog with myself over the past few months about what to do for the Dotnetnuke skin for MLS. Do I do my best to port over my current template or do I completely redesign the site? I've opted to adapt my current template over to DNN for now. Why? I'm going to be causing enough problems with throwing new forums, classifieds, account management, and other features at all my users. The last thing I need to do is confuse people even more by having the site look totally different. So I'm about 80% done in converting my current template over to a DNN skin. Some things like hiding the left hand sidebar of ads for paying members was done in the template. I had to remove that and just put a content pane there as the ads are now going to be shown using a module. So far it looks pretty good. I'm trying to cut back on the number of tables in the template. I'm trying to increase load times. I'm having trouble getting the footer to show correctly. I will work on that later this week.

On another note, I'm growing increasingly annoyed with Active Modules, the developers of Active Forums. Their support forum is a moderated forum, so you have to wait for your posts to get approved before you can get any kind of answer. The problem is, they never approve posts. I've had at least 5 or six posts never get approved. My latest, a question on skinning and specifically, the availability of a skinning guide is gone into la la land forever it seems. I submitted a support ticket about some errors I was seeing in the Snitz conversion module and I got a response back that they'd look into it after the latest release of Active Forums. Well, the release came and went. I went into the ticket system and asked for an update. A week went by with no response. I asked again for an update, no response. I finally got frustrated and found an email address for Will, the owner (I think) and asked what was up. He replied and said that they had updated the conversion tool a couple weeks earlier. Well, how the hell was I supposed to know? No one is answering my queries through their ticket system and the forum and download area was never updated. The zip file still has the same version number and everything! I downloaded the conversion tool again and attempted a conversion. I got past the initial error I was having, but lo and behold, a new error just saying that it can't convert X forum. No details or anything. I forwarded the error on to Will, and big surprise, I get a wall of silence. Argh!! It would be faster to write my own damn script.