create a more compelling web design

Seems appfuse only offers 3 models (puzzlewithstyle, andreas01 and simplicity) samples.

There is no reference to Mike Stenhouse comprehensive arrangement...
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Articles/17/
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/resources/css-framework/index.php

But Raibles samples could be complete flat from scratch re-writes...

In any event, I am wondering which module (if one exists) to integrate to trails.

Or we could just copy the sources into our codebase...
http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/resources/css-framework/css-framework.zip

Either way we have two models of layout to choose from or customize.

More theme choices...

http://css.appfuse.org/themes/

So how do you want to harness all this?

Any suggestions?

Well my first stab at this would be to identify an interface from css-framework theme to the trails web app.

CSS.THEME-<>-----TRAILS.WEBAPP

based on that trails, should have canned/pre-defined default pages to accomodate each pluggable abstraction (as opposed to just home.html... we should offer header, footer, leftmargin, rightmargin, topnav, bottomnav, leftnav, rightnav, content.a, content.b, content.c... whereby content is placable. Something to that nature.

Is there a preference on navigation models... widgets, menus, outlookbars... etc...?

AppFuse IS using Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework.
I've being playing with it and I've integrated the html markup (without a theme) to Trails pages. As a default Trails theme I was thinking in porting the tapestry maven skin to the Mike Stenhouse's CSS Framework, then we can add as much alternatives as we want.
I won't be able to work on this until I finish the modularization. So if you can't wait until then, go ahead and do it, just make sure we are 100% compatible with AppFuse themes.

Good things take time... waiting is fine for this one.

Always interested in receiving your first hand draft of how the world should be.

So please, when you get a chance delve into that.

Thanks

Well I wanted to add some additional comments...

Having been thinking about the css-framework... I think that there may be some concrete givens we can assume about this attempt to model the shape and style of the user interface at the web level... and if it is done right it could go a long way with users preferences.

One example would be navigation... there are concrete areas on the css-framework layout(s) solely dedicated to navigation. These navigations could be identified, named and stored in a trails database table as intrinsic meta-data. A subsequent trails editor could operate these intrinsics and allow extensions to be created to override defaults that would impact the content of the navigations. Hence... user-configurable navigations out-of-the-box (ootb).

Other examples are fairly obvious (user-admin, layout, theme, skin)... but these intrinsics would apply to anything user-configurable.

An abstract framework for admin and preferences could suffice that adheres to a generic crud interface. I think we have all the nuts and bolts to model these fairly rapidly.