Artisteer 3.0 and Joomla! 1.6.3 - yes, they do in fact work

[2ninerniner2]

Howdy,

There has been much written both on this forum and the Artisteer forum on the above-noted subject. As I have been using Artisteer since the day it became available and Joomla! since back in the 1.0.x days, I thought that a little experiment would help resolve this matter.

What follows below is a post I made in another topic on this forum, but I believed that it may get buried there, so that is why I created this new one so that others in the same situation may judge for themselves.

Note that the demo site is just that; there are no links to any other site other than Artisteer and whatever ships with the J! 1.6.3 Sample Data; the site is purely for demonstration purposes only.

From the other post (edited to remove references to other posts in that thread):

I have set up a live demo site with both Artisteer 3.0 and Joomla! 1.6.3 on a free hosting account.

http://jml163.comxa.com/

Artisteer:
1) the template was created on a 15" MacBook Pro, OS X 10.6.7, 8GB RAM using the latest Artisteer 3.0.0.39277 Beta
2) opened Artisteer, set Sheet > Width = 900px, Layout > Columns = Left - Content - Right
3) exported as Joomla! template ZIP

Joomla:
1) installed template as per usual and set as default
2) in Module Manager, assigned the Main Menu to user3, and some others to the left and right positions
3) assigned the syndicate feed to the syndicate module position
4) assigned the footer module to the copyright module position

That's it .... seems to work just fine for me in:

Windows: FF, Chrome, IE8, Safari, Opera
Mac: FF, Chrome, Safari

The CSS validates to 2.1 and the only reason the HTML and XHTML have 2 errors are related to the analytics code the free host inserts."

As there also seems to be a lot of consternation about the Vertical Menu in Artisteer 3, I also set that up in the Left column, and this is how:

1) Extension > Module Manager > Main Menu > Duplicate
2) Main Menu (copy) > set parameters as:
> Title = Main Menu - Vertical
> Position = Left
> Advanced Options > Module Class Suffix = art-vmenu
>Save

Some folks seem to think that the above is "a lot of extra work" but in fact, it is no different that installing and setting up a template from another source that does not have the same module positions as the default ones that ship with J! 1.6.3.

Any and all suggestions and questions are welcomed

Cheers!
Lyle