Theme development

I'm porting a website to Drupal and want a very minimalist theme that I can just wrap around it, while preserving the original look but still preserving access to Drupal functions (like create content). This is part of a transition towards Drupal.

I'd like a wireframe that might just take 50-100 pixels tall on the header and footer, and only 10-20 pixels of width on each side. My ported website is around 730 pixels wide (fixed width), and I want to keep the total width down to less than 800 pixels for low-resolution screens.

using PANELS module + GARLAND theme …

Drupal 4.7.2 + twocol_stacked.css, v 1.4 2006/08/22, GARLAND Theme

Trying (hopelessly) to narrow the margin width between my SIDEBARs and PANELs body. Left and Right margin (approx. ½ inch) is about double the width of the GARLAND default (visible where no PANEL’s used, e.g. my BLOGs). Trying to get it down to approx. 1/4 inch.

See what I mean, here-->

http://www.joo2joo.org/joo2joo-small.jpg

My site has 3 types of pages.
1) home page
2) intro page
3) inside page.

intro page is the page that talks a little about each section that is accessible from the homepage primary menu.
inside page is the pages that are accesible only after you click on the intro page link.

to view what i mean please visit this site.
www.hias.org.
click on "who we are" and that will lead you to an intro page.
now click on "History" and that will lead you to an inside page.

I am trying to print a search box and a "nice menus" (module) in the same bloc.

Now, there are two problems to that.

1-I don't know why, but simply to put this code :

<?php print $search_box ?>

does not work. Even if that is in my current theme and work.

2-I don't know how to call the "nice menus". (what code to use)

Any help would be appreciated.

Hi everybody.
I'm kinda new to the Drupal scenes so don't be cruel :-)

I'm building a website, and I want it too have a news-site layout like www.TheOnion.com
My main question is how can I get the latest added article to my php code? right now the site just shows all of the articles at the main page with the same layout, as if it were a blog. I want to be able to customize each article headline and teaser in the way of my choosing. How can I do that?

Garland's ability to let you define basic theme, text and link colors is snazzy, but I think it interferes with your attempt to define any other kinds of colors as well.

For example, I added something to the CSS stylesheet that would make the background of alternating comment boxes (the "even" class) light blue (#eeeeff). This worked fine until I did what everyone usually recommends -- save/regenerate your custom color settings -- upon which that color, and any other color I specified in the stylesheet, was displayed as a very ugly pepto bismol pink.