Hi Rick,

It isn't mandatory, but I do recommend it.

There are some advantages to updating because there are some advantages to the new panels. For example the way it gets the CSS classes and extra markup needed for Artisteer from the theme.skin files means that if the needed markup changes or the CSS classes change in a future version of Artisteer, it can be changed easily from the theme.skin file whereas in the old model it was done in code and would require me to put out a new update for mojoPortal.

Since the panels also allow you to define what element is used, it is possible to use newer HTML 5 elements like section and article instead of the default div if one wants to. It is also possible to configure it to produce less markup by only rendering the contents of any panel level and leave out the panel element. All of this is also part of a foundation that may make it easier to design skins for smart phones in the future as part of our mobile strategy.

And finally, I think the new panel structure is just easier to understand than the old way we were doing things since the panels are named for the context in which they are used, it just looks a lot cleaner than the mismash of panels and divs we were using and the logic for the rendering is much easier to maintain.

It is also possible for developers to define their own panels that inherit from BasePanel for inner markup. Whereas these panels are the main containers one could define panels for inner feature specific containers like BlogPostPanel, BlogExcerptPanel, BlogCommentPanel, BlogSideBarPanel could be defined in the blog and provide even more control over rendering within a feature. So I may take the use of this approach even deeper into features in the future to make markup even more configurable.

Best,

Joe