Theme development

Hello,

I'm in the middle of recreating my hand-coded community website in Drupal 4.7, and am in the midst of themeing.

What I'd like to do is what is currently here: www.weeklydavespeak.com

Drupal 4.7.3
Theme - Nifty Drupal
Module Banners (header area)

In the banner module there is a css to center banners and it does this:

.block-banner-1 {
    display: block;
    margin-left: auto;
    margin-right: auto }

as you can probably guess I can't get this to work in Nifty Durpal's style.php file

.. and when searching the internet for the method to use I can only find vertical or text-align

how would I do this in php?

any suggestion is most welcomed :-)

Is there any way to bypass the Themes part of Drupal? I have spent a long time designing 3 templates and CSS for my new site and I just want Drupal to use these, rather than trying to re-create the designs using the Drupal themes. Is this possible?

I had hoped that I'd be able to label various sections and menus of my templates so that I could use Drupal for CMS. Does anyone know if there is a simple way to achieve this?

Thanks in advance.

I'm trying to change the theme on new nodes and leave the existing nodes as they are. The "Theme Developers Guide" gives some really good code examples for changing the templates.

<?php
 if ($is_node5***) {
  include('new-node.tpl.php');
  return;
}
?>

So, if I have 4 existings nodes I want node 5 and higher to use a different theme. Can anyone help on this one ?

Thanks

I have been attempting (and failing) to make a flat login panel for my site. The closest thing I came to finding documentation on it was http://drupal.org/node/61932, where one of the developers of http://www.projectopus.com/ shares that he uses a DHTML js method for the look of his login section. I do not require anything that fancy, but the style of having the username and password forms alongside a submit button on a single line is what I need.

I have modified my site theme with css, however one place gives me trouble, and that's changing the author info. I am trying to change the color of the "submitted by..." text. right now it is black against a navy blue background.

Where in the css is this defined? or perhaps I need to define it, but I don't know what is controling it's display. Can someone help pls? the site is at http://poserforensicartists.com

Thanks in advance