Theme development

I messed around with the Comments xtemplate today in an attempt to make Drupal look a little more like the phpBB2 board my users are accustomed to.

http://lacus.myftp.org/~xtech/drupal_kindof_phpbbish.png

It's not perfect, nor is it even unique or interesting. In fact, it's a pretty horrible hack that uses tables instead of real CSS. I just wanted to post it to show that, yes, your forum can be changed so it looks like those other forum systems.

I am trying to create a theme using box_cleanslate as a starting point.

In a page that lists multiple nodes (example: /node), every node is output in its own <div class="node"> which contains the title and content. This enables me to display each node in a box.

But when I click to view a node by itself (example: /node/9), there is no <div class="node"> anymore and the headline is output above the edit tabs.

No matter what I try, I can't get the title to output below the edit tabs.

I've just installed Drupal and CivicSpace on my company's website. I want to create a Drupal theme that matches the design of the main website reasonable closely, but I'm still a rookie at PHP coding. Are there any experienced theme developers out there who would be interested in creating a theme under contract? For your reference, our website is http://www.riverbendpictures.com ; the website currently uses a HTML/CSS template.

I'm using a fixed-width phptemplate based theme which breaks completely if an image is viewed in original size.
Is there a way to have a completely different theme/layout if and only if a user views an image in original size?

I can code PHP, but I have no idea where to start (i.e. identify pages where the engine should apply a different theme).

How do I add different forum topic icons, like new and hot? Right now I have two topics in my test forum that are new but the class is the same .icon, so all the icons are the same irrelevant to their status. I've added the icon as a background image, but I can't seem to get how to differentiate with CSS between the new, hot and old topics. I'm using php template in case it's important. Do I have to use a special php.tpl for this? i checked the source of this forum and it seems to give a different image from php to the different status of topics. so, it's not done from css. i'm puzzled.

Is there any way to define theme-specific form fields? For example to customize certain icons the theme uses?

I imagine something like a settings.php file in the template folder which implements the following functions:
[themename]_settings() defines the additional settings names.
[themename]_settings_form() displays additional settings fields.