Theme development

I'm trying to establish my drupal site.
The thing I need is to layout my front page similar to http://www.tipic.com front page.
For example:

-------------------------
|                       |
-------------------------
|         node1         |
-------------------------
|         |             | 
|         |    node3    | 
|  node2  |             |
|         |-------------|
|         |    node4    |
|         |-------------|
|         | node5| node6|
-------------------------

And each node need to have picture (I planning to use flexinode for this)


I spend to much time fighting with CSS but this don’t work due lack of CSS2 support in browsers.


So I think I must use old good tables, but how it can be done?
When I tried CSS I just add 'id="{nodeNumber}"' to my xtmpl file of XTemplate theme to make node3 differs from node4 e.t.c. then I use xtemplate css for positioning. But as I say above this works buggy, very different in different browsers so only way to make this real works is to use tables.

• 1. How can I do this with tables and xTemplate?
• 2. Is flexinode useful for this or there other way?

Would be very glad to see comment from tipic.com developers.


Thanks, Alexandr.

I have been trying to adjust the xtemplate.xtmpl in order to put the title and the Submission details in the same block and I have realized that the node headers on the stories promoted to the front page are differnt from when they are viewed by themselves.

After downloading Goofy this evening, I found that I couldn't add Comments to Nodes. Searching through the Drupal Forums, I found that several individuals had posted regarding the same issue. I am going to provide my fix here with the caveat that you do this at your own risk. It works great for me. If anyone knows of any implications that I may not be aware of, please post a reply and let me know. That said, here's the fix:

I insert flexinode related functions into xtemplate.theme and flexinode template blocks into xtemplate.xtmpl. This comfotable to change flexinode presentation but i afraid this makes much load for server to render each field of each flexinode this way. Is any function in drupal to see page rendering time? I need to compare speed of page generation using xtemplated flexinode and phpcoded flexinode.
thanks.

I want to play around with editing the UNconed theme, so I figured I would copy
themes/unconed/* and rename everything accordingly.
For some reason my new theme shows up as "Marvin" in the configuration page.

Obviously I am going about this the wrong way - any ideas?

Is there some other file I need to tweak in order to get Drupal to recognize the new theme?

thanks,

jmw

I'm creating theme for drupal powered site and have problem with debugging theme becouse my noncomplete theme hides drupal admin menu. Is there way to set one theme for admin user and other theme for all other users?