Theme development

I'm using phptemplate to create a custom theme for my site. One of the things I wanted to do was to apply styling to the comment control elements (and at some point maybe also lay them out differently). Unfortunately the comment control elements don't have a unique class attibute to allow one to use CSS to style them.

To make it possible to style these elements, I wrapped them in a

How do I check for a node type (story, forum, page, etc) before it is displayed in phptemplate theming. I want to hide things like "tabs" on places like forums as on Drupal.org.

Thanks.

I recently changed all the colors to my theme. Everything is fine except my admin panel, I am unable to read the text. Could someone please help me and tell me where I go to change the colors for the admin section. Thanks.

I created a template using the Xtemplate method; however, when ever the page is loaded the following error is logged:

  Xtemplate error: parse: blockname [footer.message] does not exist in 

however, here is is code which contains the {footer_message} in my xtemplate.xtmpl:

Hi,

I am new to the whole content management system idea and I am wondering if I design say a graphic layout for the way I want my site to look like (designed in Adobe Illustrator) can I develope a theme, change a theme, or do somthing to the drupal system so I can implement my own graphics? How much flexibility do we have in the graphics area?

Thanks,

rkodiyar

Is there any documentation on creating the css for drupal?

I just realized that the css needs to accomodate for user or admin changing the block and content disposition, found this on the drupal.org css: