Theme development

Which is the best template engine to use that is supported by Drupal to carry us into the future? I don't want to spend time creating XTemplate themes if it means there will be no support in future releases?

Also, I need some suggestions on the following:

1) I want to create a custom home page that will be very flexible and look similar to ESPN.com or something similar. I don't like the 3 column layout as it is too restrictive in the middle column.

Using Dupal 4.6.3 according to the changelog, on MacOS 10.3.9 with php5.

I'm currently working on making a theme for a website (strangely enough). I modified an existing theme and kitted it out with a new stylesheet, and for a while all was working well, and I put the site away for a little while. This was a week or so ago. I came back to it recently, fired it up, made some changes and BAMF, no more images. Undid the changes, no deal.

I'm not sure if this topic belongs in Migration, How do I ... styles, or Theme development.

I have a nice PHP Nuke template. I read already that these are transfered to drupal, but HOW? Anyone have any experience or advise? Or am I stuck ( http://drupal.org/node/2042 )?

Many thanks in advance!

Cheers,
Todd

http://www.toddalbert.com/

P.S. Drupal RULES!

Okay,

I took over development of a fairly simple Drupal website from an earlier SysAdmin.

Debian Linux / Apache / MySQL (3.23) / PHP

Problems with a relocated directory in bootrap.inc. (previous SysAdmin moved the main .conf files, and didn't update the pointers in bootstrap.inc).

Fixed that. Got the site working beautifully for about an hour.

Logged in as admin, I changed the default theme for the website (there were 5 developed).

Kablooey! (that is a technical term, by the way).

I am sort of new at this but there are still a handful of things that still don't work right. One of them being the phptemplate engine. I believe I have followed the instructions verbatim but I have still been unable to use it. I have unpack the phptemplate folder in the '\themes\engines' directory and then also unpacked a couple of themes in the '\themes' directory but my drupal site still does not recogninze these new themes. Can anyone point me in the right direction or have any suggestions that I can try?

Thanks,
kgarrow

I'm working on a theme that uses Democratica. I'm trying to replace the logo section with a static menu (http://freedomnetworks.com/testme/) that uses javascript. I'm editing page.tpl.php and no matter where I place the code for the menu, it won't show up. Is there some module that blocks out the upper logo portion?