Theme development

Is the PHPtemplate giving you the same amount of freedom you can get with coding a plain PHP template?

Should I be concerned about the continued support of XTemplate going forward? I think it's a great addition to Drupal.

If you look at this node, http://giveorange.org/node/551 you will see an image in the right side of the node. I'd like to move all right sidebar blocks into this portion of the page so node text will wrap around and under the blocks if there are only a few, rather then having the right sidebar stretch all the way down the length of the page even if the blocks don't stretch that far, any ideas how to do this?

I've got an image right beside a paragraph.

Basically, it looks something like this:

<p>text</p><img src="/example" />

But what ends up happening is the image displays below the paragraph, when I want it to display beside it.

What CSS can I use to get the image to display to the immediate right of the paragraph?

Thanks :)

I need lists that show titles and excerpts of articles in various categories on the home page. For instance, a list of recent articles in "Movies" and a list of recent articles in "Music." I'm using this method to theme the homepage seperately (in phpTemplate).

Tried searching on drupaldocs.org, but code I got caused a redeclare error. Is there a simple way to call specific blocks to print them in a node or using front_page.module? I'm wanting to use aggregator specifically, but others could be useful. I'm also curious about using node.tpl to have certain blocks display within a certain node. I can probably figure that out in theming instructions, but figured I'd throw it out there as well. The first question is more important to me, thanks.