Theme development

New to Drupal, have researched much.
I'm wanting to choose a css layout theme (using phptemplate) with clean code + best practices, as a base to develop from. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I'm not developing an official theme, it's just for one site.

Also, what is the status of the theme garden at: http://themes.drupal.org/ which seems to have been down since summer. That would be a great resource.

I'm excited to dive into the drupal learning curve!

Anyone know where I can find the documentation for Marvin 2K - want to take it as the base to develop a new theme but I can't find ANYTHING that tells me how the structure, CSS etc hang together. It's as basic as this - replace existing Drupal logo.png - doesn't show up?! Does the fact the Drupal logo.png used is a clickable object/area have anything to do with it?

As with most things Drupal - driving me nuts - but I'm persevering on sleep deprivation + coffee!

I want the user to select a background image for a theme, thus not using a style sheet. I want to user to choose a background when configuring the theme. But I haven't found a way to get extra settings on the theme settings page. So I decided to use the primary links for this (But if someone can tell me how to add extra settings on theme admin page, I'am using phptemplate engine, I will be very happy). But how can I access only the first primary link of the $primary_links variable in page.tpl.php. I tried $primary_links[0] but that didn't work.

Here you can post samples of custom Drupal themes, built with phptemplete and free for download.

Have just started using Drupal using standard bluemarine as base template. Had the idea of a 2 col layout with main section and right-col with the variable display of a third col (left-col) between main content and right-col dependent on main content.

Moved code snippet for left-col, including begin/end tags, to a column 2 table position just before the right-col code.

Upon looking at the xtemplate.xtmpl files for a few XTemplate themes I have noticed that the following code is always used when placing the blocks.

<!-- BEGIN: blocks -->
<td id="sidebar-left">
{blocks}
</td>
<!-- END: blocks -->

I am trying to keep from using tables whenever possible and using CSS positioning instead. Is it required to place the blocks inside a table with an ID to differentiate between "sidebar-left" and "sidebar-right"?

Thanks!