Theme development

Hi all, I just finished my first theme (holiday season) which is just a modified version of XTemplate. It's pretty simple to change the apperance with colors, etc. But is there a way to add graphics to the different items? So, instead of the heading for Blog saying "Blog", there would be a picture of a scroll or something like that?

You can check out what I've done so far at www.sweetwatersea.com.

Thanks,

Steve

I'm 2 days new to Drupal, and love it already. I've been hacking away at xtemplate today to get the exact feel I'm looking for. I want to have a nice border around each "Story" published to the main page, just like the border in the UnConeD theme. Seeing that xTemplate does not use tables, I'm a beyond my understanding of how these themes work. Is what I desire still possible in a CSS driven template?

thank you.

Does a user need shell access to develop and upload themes? Or can they grab them, edit them locally, and transfer them into place with a file manager or FTP/SCP tool?

We require to use two templates at the same time. In detail:

We want to post some nodes inside a web page using template #1 (let's call it that). However, we require another template to a news main site (let's call it drupal.xxx.com) which requires to operate under a template #2. Both instances involve unauthenticated users.

Ive been playing with a theme, all css based. For me its easier than Xtemplate theme. 3 columns no tables etc.. How/Should I submit it?
Its running on my site www.baldy.za.net Have a look and let me know what you guys think.

Cheers
Laurence

Hey,

I have given a spin at creating my first template. It really seems quite simple and I have used my favourite templating engine, namely patTemplate. After some effort, the results show up quite nicely. However, I have found that functions such as theme_blocks("all", $this); are quite inflexible because they print their content instead of returning it and letting the theme developer decide what to do.

Now I am forced to split up my templates in many unrelated segments like:

footer() {
  printSubTemplateFooter1;
  theme_blocks("all", $this);
  printSubTemplateFooter2;
}

Where I could be trivially doing:

footer() {
  $t = theme_blocks("all", $this);
  assignValueToTemplateVariable($t);
  printWholeFooterTemplate;

I have checked all the obvious routes (FAQ, etc.) and I recall seeing some discussion but my knowledge of past implementation is nil. Looking at the calls under 'theme_blocks', the code itself seems pretty unremarkable, hidden in there is a single offending 'print' that does all the damage.

I suppose there might be some good reasons for taking this approach, but I think that -for example- using an optional flag parameter in the block printing routines would provide a great deal of flexibility at minimum cost. Splitting up templates might be a natural for me but my graphic designers will be surely pained. Is there anything I have overlooked?