Theme development

I am new to developing themes for drupal and jumped at PHPTemplate as I am familiar with php, however I was wondering what everyone elses experiences were with PHPTemplate or any other engines?

I ask as I don't want to focus on PHPTemplate if support will not be continued in the future.

Hi! I want to refer to a taxonomy term's id number in a bit of PHP theme code. How do I access the variable? Is it $taxonomy->term[0], but I am not sure!

Thanks!

I understand that $terms gives me the title of the category including the link, but which variable gives me just the path, without the link. I want to attach it to an icon in my theme. Thanks!

I have noticed that certain fonts render differently in IE compared to Firefox. I would like to modify the definition
of one core element of my stylesheet (the "body" definition "font:..." line) depending on whether the user is using IE or any other browser. I consider this an attempt to work around an IE specific bug.

Can it be done? If so, how ?

Mike

PS: Installed drupal a week ago, and I *love* it. Using it for one workk related site at the moment, and if this is a success, I'll re-do three other sites to use it.

I have built up a theme and it seems to be almost complete, however the blocks won't echo out correctly.

I have added this to my block.tpl.php page:

  <h2><?php print $block->subject ?></h2>
  <?php print $block->content ?>

and thats all thats in that file, however the blocks still take up very little of the actual column width I have allowed them and I cannot seem to get it working. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have recently managed to transfer my existing theme over to drupal. However the theme uses dark background colours so the bullet points are pratically invisible and the grey used for the admin menu boxes and tabs is hard to read from and just looks rubbish.

How do I overwrite the defaults with only the one CSS file for my theme?