fyi, I contacted Artisteer:

Hi,
I am the founder and primary developer of mojoPortal, an open source CMS in ASP.NET.
Users of mojoPortal keep asking me about Artisteer support, so I'm beginning an evaluation of your product to see if it is feasible.
I see that you already support DotNetNuke templates.
I wonder if you might consider working together to get support for mojoPortal in your product, I would be glad to help in any way to make that happen and would even consider giving you some free advertising for Artisteer on mojoportal.com with prominent placement for a period of time.

Their response:

Hello Joe,

We currently have a list of 80 CMS products that our customers asked us to support and we are very busy working on some of them plus maintaining the ones we already support.
We also have many other tasks related to Artisteer functionality therefore unfortunately we do not see a way to work with you until we finalize many of our other priorities first.

However, Artisteer includes all CMS support files in open source format, therefore you can copy and modify the DNN export files to support your CMS.

For example some of our customers and partners are implementing support for their CMS applications within Artisteer by modifying the open source files that Artisteer installs.
Here is one of such companies:
http://www.grafxsoftware.com/news.php/Ready-for-next-Company-Website-Builder-and-Artisteer/1/72/

Also, the CMS at http://www.quickersite.com/ is using Artisteer HTML templates with their CMS even without changing the output.

We recommend that you try to do the same that the above companies did, while we can answer basic questions from you.

Best regards,

Paul Hudson
Extensoft, Inc.
/ Artisteer
Artisteer - The Automated Web Designer

So I guess it can only happen if I figure out a way to do it myself. Maybe I will have to add the Artisteer css class names in mojoPortal to make it easier. At some point I will try this but I have many things on my to do list.

Best,

Joe

Hi Jamie,

It's funny you find this thread just now as I'm actually planning to work on this tomorrow afternoon. It is encouraging to hear that your experiments went fairly well. My plan is to actually add the Atristeer css classes where they need to go in mojoPortal, not counting the ones that go in layout.master. And then make a reference skin or two based on Artisteer templates and maybe a video tutorial. (assuming I can get it all working)

As far as the needed extra html markup, I have a plan for that as well by adding a control that can render the needed extra markup where it needs to go, but can also be disabled and would be disabled by default to avoid adding the markup to existing skins, but it will only require a setting in the theme.skin file of the skin to opt in and enable it. We have something similar already with the extra markup for corner rounding http://www.mojoportal.com/rounding-corners.aspx

I'm really on the verge of a new release and have some bug fixes that need to ship asap, but plan to spend an afternoon to see how far I can get to implement this for the coming release because if it falls together as I hope it would make it much easier to adapt the html templates produced by Atrtisteer. So maybe in this coming release but if I run into difficulty I will punt until the next release to try and add support for Artisteer.

I definitely think it is worthy to invest time in it, if I could make an easy path from their html templates to a mojoPortal skin it would definitely be a big boost for mojoPortal.

Best,

Joe

I didn't get to work on this yesterday as I had hoped but I've spent about 5 hours on it today. The design I'm working with came from this site which has a bunch of html templates generated with Artisteer. I wish I had bookmarked the actual design, now I will have to look for it again.

At any rate the original looks like this:

So far after 5 hours my mojoPortal skin looks like this:

I'm pretty happy with progress so far, basically I'm adding some of the Artisteer CSS classes where they need to go and adding some options to enable the extra markup needed. I'm hoping to release a new version in a few days with this skin as the first one based on Artisteer. I may need to refine things further in coming releases as I learn about variations in the templates generated by Artisteer, but it is a good start. Once I get it all worked out I will write an article about how to convert an Artisteer html template to a mojoPortal skin, and my goal is for it to be pretty easy.

Anyway, thought I would share my progress.

Cheers,

Joe

I worked on this all day today. Basically, I created a few controls that by default render no extra markup but can be turned on from theme.skin file to render the extra markup for Artisteer. Yesterday I implemented a CSS Adapter for the menu to render it as needed for Artisteer menus. So after implementing the support controls most of the work was mechanical, adding the extra controls to existing features and pages where needed as well as adding some extra css classes in a few places to make everything friendly for converting an Artisteer html template to a mojoPortal skin.

You can checkout my progress so far on demo.mojoportal.com using the skin named artisteer-7greenk.

The design is from 

http://freetemplates.quickersite.com/QuickerTemplates.com%20III/7_green_k/page.html

Check out my version at demo.mojoportal.com

I'm sure I've missed a few things and invite your eyes to find any issues or missing styles, but I think I've mostly finished it except for a few refinements like the orange buttons. 

Since I've only done 1 Artisteer design I can't be sure yet whether it will be easier with my next design or if I missed anything needed for general support of Artisteer designs, but I think I'm on the right track and hope that the next one will be much easier so I can then document the steps to convert an html template to a mojoPortal skin. We shall see, it may take a few more iterations before I have it all worked out.

That said, I think the first skin is looking great and have a feeling I'm on the verge of making it really easy to use Artisteer to make mojo skins.

It has been a long friday, signing off for now.

Cheers,

Joe