I've had the pleasure of extending the SimpleVote module lately and I wanted to share some of the things I learned with other starting developers. I extended the SimpleVote module to add access control, association with node types and other things. The text I wrote is too big to post here so I will link to it. I have also included the source of the extended module, together with the code of the original module.
I was having some troubles configuring my frontpage as I liked. After messing around with the $page==0 and $is_front Variables in phptemplate and testing several php-Hacks directly in the page.tpl.php file I found a solution to get phptemplate's $is_front Variable running correctly:
phptemplate.engine, lines 79 and 80 read as follows: