Theme development

The Kubrick theme for Drupal has been quite usable for peoples. Now I am looking at converting 2 more GPL designs to Drupal. They are Manji and Persian. The first one, in particular, is very good and stylable. I think these two will make good themes for a drupal-based personal blog. (which I think none of the available themes is really suitable for)

Hello. I'd like to break up my front page so that it will display the 5 most recent stories grouped by taxonomy. In other words, I'd like to display the last 5 stories of say "politics", and then beneath that, I'd like to display the last 5 stories of "editorials", etc. I'm moving over from Movable Type, and this used to be very easy to do in that system by specifying "lastn" and "category". However, I'm completely unfamiliar with Xtemplate. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

I am using the pushbutton theme (phptemplate) and would like to know how I could pull out just the URLs from the primary or secondary links array - not the descriptions or the link names.

Would anyone be willing to provide me with an example of how to do this or refer me to a relevant thread?

I'm trying to insert this dropdown rollover menu in my theme. It works fine on firefox, but all the links get squished to the left on IE.
http://1wo.org

If anyone could take a quick look and let me know what they thing is going on I'd really appreciate it. I"m using box_cleanslate. phpengine.

Hi forum,

I am doing my best to learn CSS but I have never been good at any web design so I'm finding it really hard to make the slightest of alterations to my drupal site. Could anyone help me make alterations to the Chameleon/Marvin theme please?

http://www.andreweglinton.com/drupal

What I am struggling to get done is the following:

I'm new to Drupal and am learning my way around, I didn't know the best way to create different sections in drupal that would have different blocks on them, is this easily possible, I've seen it down on some sites, but I'm not sure if its created in more of a static form, ie http://urlgreyhot.com/ I've downloaded several modules but think I've just ended up confusing myself. I have minimal PHP experience but am a quick learner, and am working my way around CSS. I'm more of an old school HTML and Java Programmer.