I'm still getting my feet wet with Drupal, but loving it thus far :) After a few weeks with the system, I've made one simple site so far: www.moldovanow.org (based on a customized version of the antique_modern template). My previous experience was only with Joomla, which I used to make www.firstfamilychurch.net - but overall it was less flexable and more quirky than I wanted for my own use. After that I found Drupal :)
Through what I learned on that first site, I have a quick question I hope someone can point me in the right direction on....
I often found that since I was working from an already "complete" template (antique_modern) that had many intricacies that I didn't necessarily understand since I didn't put them there haha, I would often run into roadblocks/bugs/etc as I made my own changes and additions. So for my next project I'd like to begin by building on top of as "simple" a template as possible, which still contains all of the necessarily CSS classes to style all of Drupal's basic functions (which I can then restyle without fear of any conflicts).
So, can you please confirm for me what the best choice of template is to use as a "core" for my own unique templates in the future? I will be seeking to make all of my future endeavors with Drupal completely unique, table-free for layout, and standards compliant. I "suspect" something like pushbutton or bluemarine since they appear to be defaults, but since they're table-based I wanted to check to be certain before diving in. Also if there happens to be any known "extra" stuff in whatever is considered the most core template, I'd love to know those classes so I can weed them out if they're unnecessary for me.