Dear Drupal Community, (I'll try to keep this as short as possible, sorry if I'm unable to!)
About 2 weeks back I decided to go with Drupal to build an interactive e-journal+website for a community of researchers and practioners. Found a hosting firm, Installation and download went alright, I did it rather carefully and its up and running now. I've checked in the first few pages, used both bluemarine and pushbutton (Xtemplate engine) and they seem to work ok. I'm quite excited to use Drupal because in my comparison with other CMSes it met most of my criteria cleanly. The fun begins now.
What I can't clearly tell is which theme engine should I use for my needs, because by and large they
all seem to fit the bill, but with some differences.
My requirements are: 1. I will likely need a horziontal navbar (just plain html blocks/cells colored and bordered) on top for things like Home, About us, Contact, Organisational stuff. 2. I will need a left hand side navbar for topic and subtopic based navigation of stories and reports, again simple colored bordered cells with links, no frills. 3. Spaces on top left and/or top right for logo, slogan, etc. 4. A clean footer space for logo, links etc. 5. Main body contained within all this must be customisable for content as well as blurbs in boxes, boxed on the right. 6. I'd like complete control of colors, borders (for anything) 7. Also, I'd like control of white space proportioning between blocks or elements 8. speed of rendering is key for me, don't want the choice of templating to slow down stuff.