vb Blog Cutomization Help Needed

[ft-craig]

Hi everyone,

I purchased the suite and plan on setting up the site so the main news and stories that I have are posted as articles through the CMS, and allow users to post their own opinions and stories to the blog.

I am going to have several different categories (we'll call them category 1, 2 and 3). Additionally, I plan to limit the categories that a blog post can have to just 1. That being said, each category (from the CMS) has slightly different designs (colors, logo, and sidebar contents). I would like for the blog to have the same design as the CMS (2 columns (33% and 66%) + 1 sidebar) with the conent of the blog going into the 66% column. Additionally, I want all blog posts that are categorized as category 1 to have the category 1 style, all category 2 blog posts to have the category 2 style, and etc.

I have never seen anything like this done before, so I started to try to play around with some of the code, and have had no luck. I tried the following (to just get started) and also had no luck:

<div<vb:if condition="$blog_category['blogcategoryid'] == 3"> id="3"<vb:elseif condition="$blog_category['blogcategoryid'] == 1" /> id="1" <vb:else /> id="usercss"</vb:if> class="blog">

This was an attempt to get <div id="3" class="blog"> when blogcategoryid= is active.

Having the blogs work this way is extremely important for my web site. Please let me know if there is a way to do this, or if I would need to hire someone, please point me in the correct direction.

Thank you,
Craig