Theme development

Hi all, and thanks in advance for any help,

Tried to create new theme with phptemplate. I can get style.css to have an effect, but *.tpl.php seem to have no effect. I'm pretty stuck on what's behind this.

Below is what I did:

- Copied *.tpl.php from engines/phptemplate
- Created page.tpl.php with content of box_grey/page.tpl.php (because there is no page.tpl.php in the engines dir)
- Switch to theme, the site appears unformatted (it has a sidebar, no colours etc.).

Is phptemplate engine going to move to centerstage and be more 'part' of Drupal or is xtemplate still going strong and will always be with Drupal. Which is going to get more support down the road? What about smarty. How will these template engines fit in with Drupal in the further. Which one will be the 'leader'?

I am trying to customise the theme bluemarine and I want to do a couple of things: 1. I want to add a link (like the one optional to members) somewhere, preferably in the side block, which allows visitors to turn blocks off. 2. I also want to drop down where the top block sits on the page. I have been playing with style.css for the block location but I am not so savvy with such things. The link thing I wouldn't know where to start.

I have a custom profile field for "full names", wich is called profile_full_name.

I'm customizing a PHPTemplate and I would like to show the user's full name when displaying a node, then I'm editing the file node.tpl.php. How can I do this? I've tried:

 if ($page == 1):		
     global $user;
     echo "<h3>" . profile_view_field($user,1) . "</h3>";

... but it doesn't return anything.

What's wrong?

You can have a look at them here: http://sandbox.ichris.ws

There is no fancy theme switcher, and only a page per theme to be viewed, but I hope it helps.

P.S. Just saw that Kubrick and Persian is on Theme Garden (http://webschuur.drupaldevs.org/) now, I guess you can play with it a bit more over there :P

I am looking at making my first theme for drupal major problem is that I have no php experience so I imagine it would be best for me to make a xtemplate theme. Does any one have a link to a an xtempalte them which uses no tables. I tried cutting all the table bits out the default theme and making my own from that but I keep getting errors. I just want the code drupal will uses and all the files like logo so no erors will occur and then I can build from there. Any help would be grand.