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So the first screen shot shows the page where you set up the CMS page layout. This is a 75%/25% layout grid. We give you a number of options, and it's possible to create your own. Here I've put the content on the left, and two widgets on the right, for navigation and "my friends activity". This is all done with drag and drop. See the scrolling list of widgets on the left? You press the button to put one on the page, then drag it to the place you want it. You can have widgets on any of the columns, above or below the main content.
The second and third screen shots show widget configuration interfaces. Each widget type has it's own interface. To repeat, you create as many widgets as you want, each with it's own unique configuration. So for example you could have dozens of RSS feed widgets, each of is an RSSFeed widget type. Each has its own configuration, which for that widget is the URL of the feed. You then put each of those widgets onto one or more page layouts. Then when you create a CMS article you define the page layout.
The fourth page shows a CMS page. For this page I have turned the commenting on and made a couple of comments. You see the content in the center and left, extracts of the comments on the bottom with links to the discussion thread, the navigation widget at the top right, and below that the output of the "my friends" activity widget. In any real article of course the content would be more than two short sentences, but I wanted you to see everything at once.
Now that the skin is almost done being templated do you have any new screenshots for us? So for we've seen nothing from the CMS.
Thanks!
First, the cms layout just sets up the area that's reserved for widgets vs primary content. By that measure this looks to me like a simple two-column 2/3-1/3 layout.
Second, there is a fairly complex arrangement of widgets that do things like summarize sections. We don't currently have all those widgets available. You may have seen the post where Ray introduced the development team, and he mentioned that Don has been reviewing the CMS system to make it more user-friendly. Don's goal is to be able to make pages like this. I'm currently adding features to make the aggregation, organization, & categorization more powerful. I'm not in a position to make promises for Jelsoft, but I believe that will all be in the 4.0 release. I can't promise that all possible aggregation widgets will be available, but there should be enough to do this page. I haven't had time to review every detail on the page, and there may be something that isn't on our initial widget list. With statichtml you should be able to do whatever we don't have a specialized widget for.
Third is the background images and central column layout. This would be done in the css and template. In theory it should be possible to do it purely in css, but it's likely that some template changes would be necessary. You should be able to make this page as long as you are comfortable working with css and templates, or have someone who is.
Fourth is the header. It looks a lot different from the standard vB header, so that definitely would require some combination of css and template tweaks. That's not really about CMS but more about the new templates and styling. I recommend to you Kier's posts on the subject.
Hope that helps.
Ed