Theme development

Hello fellow Drupals!

Ok, let me be honest...I'm a Mamber...but I'm very interested in Drupal. I am already highly impressed by how simple and integrated Drupal is. What I would like to know is this:

Take a look at the site: http://www.wbgl.org
I am the new webadmin for this site...however it is, for the most part, static HTML galore...Yuck!

I am looking to convert this to a CMS. I have used Mambo in the past for other projects, however there is a very simple visual element to this site that I wish to capture. I found that in Mambo it was going to take a good chunk of source editing (as far as I have found) to accomplish.

Notice on the main page that all the images have a border around them. Also to the left of all the text entries there is a vertical black line that accompanies the lenght of the text. Collectively this is what I would like to accomplish for all entries on the main page. Very simple in HTML.

The problem with mambo is that the WYSIWYG editors had limited control over how your actual entries layed out as far as formatting is concerned. I know I could have stuck with making purely HTML entries in Mambo w/o using a WYSIWYG editor, however I'm looking to allow non-coders at this station to update parts of the site themselves.

This brings me to Drupal.

How extendable are Drupals themeing mechanisms? With Mambo I would have had to edit the way the data was stored in the SQL tables. While this is something I could have done, I wish to keep this conversion as time-efficient as possible.

just a quick note on the above theme, which is broken in internet explorer, the right side some css adjustments:

here is our revised code

	#sidebar {
	padding-top: 30px;
	width:240px;
	float: right;
	position: relative;
	right: 5px;

	}
	#wrap > #sidebar {
		float: right;
		width: 205px;
		
	}

Apologies if this has been posted before.

Is there a way child-themes (i.e. subfolder themes) to have phptemplate check the child theme directory for overrides first, then look in the parent theme folder, like it does with style.css files?

The reason I ask, is that I have created a theme family that that offers several different layouts. The only differences between them are the style.css(minor changes) and the page.tpl.php. One is a 3 column, one is a 2 column, etc. All the other tpl files( and there are a lot) can be shared.

Hello,
i've just started with drupal (4.6.3) and I'm making a few sites with it developing themes for each one on PHPTemplate engine. I am having problems with primary and secondary links. No matter how many links I create in the configure menu of my theme the $primary_links and $secondary_links arrays consist of a single element containing only the last link in the input forms.
It seems like the configuration menu for phptemplate themes keeps the information but I cannot get the full array into my $primary_links array in the theme's page.tpl.php file.

For the past week or so I have been working on a theme that I made mainly for bloggers that use drupal. I plan on having a series of themes for bloggers actually. I entitled the current one "BlogMetal"

I was kind of wondering how many people liked this theme and also what could be added or changed. All the images in the theme also come with the photoshop files so you can edit them whenever. the font of the title is OffensiveBold.

Is it possible to make a separate search form that excludes certain node types(e.g. only returns results found in flexinode-2 node types)? But I don't want to affect the normal search which I also need.