Good lord, finally got more of the site moved over to Mach II. 

Events are your friend! Not nearly as hard to do as I'd thought when I first heard about Mach II. Not so much. There's some setup on the front end of things when you first start designing your application, but it's worth it.

Far easier to make changes in ONE place instead of going all over to make sure your path to your cfc in 1 billion templates is right. (yes, I can be quite the sloppy coder)

Example of the 'front page' of my site:

(this is what is called in my mach ii config file via event handler)

<event-handler event="topfiveblog" access="public">
           <view-page name="blog_top5" contentArg="content" />                                                                   <announce event="defaultLayout" copyEventArgs="true"/>

</event-handler>

"blog_top5" is the template that has what I wish to show in the main template.

"Content" is where I am going to put this template inside of the main template.

"default layout" puts together a header, the main, and footer templates.

And now, time to work on the login listener, so's I can add the admin side of this whole thing.

(and fix my editor, once and for all. What a POS it became. Oy.)