Theme development

Hi

I'm new to PHP, and Drupal theme dev.

I found a realy cute theme, that I want to use it on my website. You can find it here.

So, i'm new to Drupal / PHPTemplate / PHP and I need some help.

My first problem is that this theme is using a ID="current", for the current link, from the primery links. My first solution was to skip that. But , it could be nice to make it, or just to learn how could I do that ( the print loop, doesn`t have control on that ).

I am trying to use a icon to the left of the read more text.
I know this has been asked and answered in the past but I am still having problems.

Here is what I have done.
1. created a folder /themes/garland/icons
2. added the file edit-past.png to the icons folder
3. edit the style.css

This is insane. The administrator mode does not allow me any way (that I can find) to do the most basic things, like

make the menu names actually fit on, instead of, bleed off the tabs;
change the so-called slogan; or
change the so-called footer.

I've got plenty of other issues I can't solve, but I'd like to at least accomplish these basics. I'm a pretty smart guy, but this program seems to me to be almost unintelligible.

Someone please help.

Hi everyone,

Ive been customising my new drupal installation to look like my old site and as I am pritty new to drupal I was in search for a little help. I want to know how to change the location of the primary navigation to the left hand side bar rather than the top. I am using th B7 theme. I have tried php trickery to no result.

What would be the best way to change its location?

Hi all,

I'm pretty new to Drupal, but quite fluent in PHP. What I need to do is create a List View using the Views Module, generating a Block. I tried theming that view by overriding it in template.php following these instructions http://drupal.org/node/42597

By default, the data for each node listed in the List View is "nid", "node_title" and "node_created".

hi,

I'm looking at using Drupal for an organization's website that I consult for. It seems to be the best technical solution for the new vision they have, and adding new content is generally a snap.

Here's the catch, though; they want their own custom theme. The guy that did the last version of the website is a great designer and makes stunning work that is clean, eminently usable, and effective. His current sphere of knowledge, however, is confined to XHTML/CSS.

I've never written a Drupal theme myself, but a cursory examination makes it look like there's at least some PHP code to write (although it appears to be mostly copy/pastable). We can afford to invest some time in learning how to write Drupal themes, but not too much.

So, I'm writing to ask for some suggestions:

1. If one already has significant web design experience, how well does that experience translate over to making a new Drupal theme? Is it, for instance, a completely different experience from anything else? Or is it mostly similar, with perhaps minor injections of PHP code and some templates to follow?
2. What are some good resources should I point him towards to get started? (Again, he doesn't have any web development experience in areas other than XHTML/CSS.)