Please, no frames in standard toolkit pieces, which I presume this is destined to become.
The site you refer to is pretty ugly with the top frame - I get a scroll bar in the bottom one and its "frame-ed-ness" is immediately obvious. It can be better hidden, of course, but we really want to avoid frames unless there's a compelling reason to use them.
(the CMS started life as a standalone system and Karl Goldstein probably used frames because he had to do everything differently than was done in the ACS - if ACS 4.0 had been framed then he probably wouldn't've used them in the CMS!)
You don't really want to dictate layout struture to users of such a facility. There will be portlets and applets for dotLRN that can be shoved around by users on their own page.
Ola et al can also supply an includable panel that could be run across the top of the page by a [sub]site's custom master template. Or at the bottom of the page. Or in the middle of the page. Or wherever the *site designer*, not the *package implementor* chooses.
(the portlet in turn can just include the includable panel after grabbing some basic portlet values that tell it whether or not to actually display itself, etc)
