We need to not allow full control over these, otherwise designers will not bother with creating forum skins. What I think is we can use some generic CSS Classes and create a standard admin.css file that is part of the module to control graphics and color. This approach is very similar to what DNN does w/ the default.css. This allows subclassing, we make sure the admin.css is loaded first, and of course skin developers can override the css classes via their skin. Even the admin areas I am discussing will load the skin css files. (Assuming designer creates a generic skin.css)

The layout will be controlled by the programmers for these admin/add content type interfaces (which is the norm), using settings to enable/disable functionality displayed (which we do now). I feel pretty confident this is the correct approach, but there are still a few things to iron out. For instance, how do we allow complete control over the icons not used in the 'skin' parts?