Theme development

Hey people,

How hard would it be to feature profiles on the front page - either through a template directly or block? I'm thinking of something like this:

http://www.coroflot.com/

q./

I am trying to limit a block's visibility. The block is created by the banner.module and so to control regions I have a number of blocks enabled. The problem is that there is not always content in a block. I want to use the php visibility settings of the block to say "if the block has content then display it, otherwise don't"

Any ideas?

Ok so I went and got the xTemplate stuff from the downloads section. Here's what I got:
license.txt - tells me nothing about how to install or use.
xtemplate.inc - has some code at the bottom but I have no idea what it's for
xtemplate.engine - has code in it but have no idea what it is for

I'm not sure how best to describe this, and I am a drupal n00b, so I drew what I wanted to do in photoshop:

http://img143.imageshack.us/my.php?image=templateconceptdo6.jpg

I have a need to change the background color of a sticky page based on it's
taxonomy category.

I.E. sports = green, news = yellow etc.

I am using the box_cleanslate theme

Any help would be appreciated.

Ron

Two col doesn't work with IE 7
I change twocol_stacked.css in panels module modules/panels/layouts/twocol_stacked.css

.panel-2col-stacked .panel-col-first { 
  float: left; 
  width: 50%; 
 
}
.panel-2col-stacked .panel-col-last { 
  float: left; 
  width: 50%; 

}

I change to