Theme development

I'm curious about it. What theme negine to use. An XTemplate is very simple system and not very plastic.
Please tell me what engine to use (most popular) and why.
Thanks

Hello
this is sanjeev.We generally create nodes for accomplishing any type of task.For example we create story module to create story node.So in order to create stories node we need to write story module.Now what i want is to create a module and within that module i want to develop various types of node module.
I need suggestion & help on this activity.Reference is project module.

With Regards
sanjeev
sanjeevpro@gmail.com

I am thinking I need to create a custom node. What I want to do is have a review section on my site where games can be rated and scored and have data collected and displayed for certain aspects, say graphics, sound, gameplay, etc. Would I need to create some type of custom node and then have the fields to enter the desired data on my node creation page?

I thought it would be good to have a "steps to convert your design into a drupal theme" page in the drupal handbook.
Im working on documenting the process from start to finish the steps required to fully integrate a design into drupal from scratch.
To start with I have created a simple interface design mockup that will be the main page template for a stock drupal setup.
my original post is on my site here including screenshots:
http://isaachorton.liquidratio.com/2006/01/drupal_theme_customization_doc/

My goal is to fully document (with screenshots) all steps in the process along with any code snippets and tips for converting that come up along the way. I noticed in working on my own theme development that is very cumbersome and time consuming just searching for code snippets to do common functions/enhancements(ie style $links or something like that), so i think this will be beneficial to anyone just getting started theming for drupal to find this info in one nicely organized location!

If anyone has any pertinent advice that they would like to offer, I will be going through any and all suggestions and including appropriate ones in a final list of "recommended" reading/resources for themers.

Ill also be covering hot topics relating to theme development and other UI concerns, like use of AJAX, Flash, Javascript, CSS, coding standards and all that fun stuff!...

next steps include:

I've ported William Pramana's fine Golden Gray Wordpress theme to Drupal 4.7 for a site I'm creating. It was a quick job so there are likely issues but it works reasonably well. It has been tested with Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.5, and IE 6 on Drupal 4.7.0-beta3 with a modicum of modules (forum, blog, image, and other core modules) enabled.

Known issues include:

I'm developing a new theme and I need the menu items to have on-states. I'm using the menu module. I figured out that I can compare the url path to the items in the menu_get_menu array, but is there a cleaner way to do this? Is there a function that will tell me which page I'm on?

Thanks!

Moses