Theme development

So I read somewhere that in version 4.7 it would be relatively easy to create a theme like theonion.com and so i figured since its now beta2 i would start playing with it, but alas I am very new to phptemplate and haven't figured out how to do it all so im at the stage where i have the html, i just don't have the phptemplate stuff.

here is a link to the html,
http://www.silikonslackers.com/onion.html

Hi. I am currently using the flatforum module because it is decent. However, on a post, it won't validate as XHTML 1.1, while the rest of my site does. I can't find where to exactly fix these errors. Any help is greatly appreciated.
http://onj.andrelouis.com/hkc/site/node/21

Hi,
I'm having problem fix the main block's disply width. Could someone show me how and where to edit? tks

for example, i want to have

aligned to the left and having
left bar = 150 pix main block = 450 pix and right bar = 200

also, i believe i have turned on HTML enabled input.. but when i type in URLs.. still won't show as LINK.

could someone help me why is so? tks

Greetings!

I posted this question in reply to an upgrade question that was answered. Then I realized that this evolved into a theme design help question after posting so I am reposting my question here. Hope this does not offend anybody.

I have just finished porting my CSSimple theme to drupal 4.7.x. It is available from my site here.

CSSimple is a PHPTemplate based theme for drupal 4.7.x. It uses pure CSS for layout and handles both three-column and two-column layouts. I jiggered it to make it easy to port themes from wordpress, and have ported around 20 themes from a wordpress theme competition.

Greetings!

I just started messing with 4.7 on a dev site to see what it would take to convert my current site from 4.6 and ran into a couple of minor issues.

1: the friendsElectric (This includes my own modified version and the stock one) Theme has a couple of compatibility issues that I was able to hack around. once I took a peek under the hood. This little adventure convinced me to take a stab at doing my own theme. I just have to say that the php theme engine is amazingly simple to use. Great JOB!