Theme development

Hello.

Is there a way just to restyle the nodes of the forum?

I want to let them look like a normal bulletin board, so the name of the poster is displayed on the right, maybe even with an avatar, it shell look similar to phpbb, vbulletin, wbb and all these boards..

greetz,
Frando

First, I want to say I'm a newbie to Drupal. So far I like it, and has had not so many problems to solve. Or not too hard to crack by myself.

Second - I wanted to personalize my testing website with the ADC theme. Installing and running the site with this theme is not a problem - it comes at the very moment I click on submit when posting some content (it was blog entry I tried) - I get this message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: link_node() in /disk3/free/www/kolodej/themes/adc/adc.theme on line 125

On 4.6 that is. To be more precise the default avatart shows in preview no the actual users avatar. Is this a theme engine bug?

I would like to display the number of comments on a given Story on the homepage for instance, just like the drupal.org them:

» 5 comments · 5 new comments · read more

How can I do this?

I notice that the Drupal Smarty theme engine has not been released for 4.6 (maybe the 4.5 version works anyway?)

Is this a sign that noone wants to use Smarty with Drupal? I do.

I keep getting these warning message: