Theme development

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:

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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:

i have done themeing in postnuke. it's prety tedious. would it be fairly for a novice coder to take a dreamweaver template and drupal it?

Hi,

I am an absolute beginner in CSS having worked on J2EE and PERL for most of my career. I want to spend some time on learning CSS and PHP for developing Themes for Drupal, Wordpress and Mambo. Just for fun. I am sure most of you would know of good books on CSS targeted towards skinning/theme devlopment. If theres a book which can get me in then please post its title

Regards
Nitin