Theme development

I've noticed that as present, drupal is only capable of assigning either left or right position to a block. Are there any modifications planned to support more than 2 areas for blocks, perhaps by assigning either left,right or a value from 0 (or 1) to 9? I have plans for a 4 column layout, which at present I'm having to hardcode one of the columns into the theme itself, which will technically work but I'd much prefer it if I could assign blocks to that column as it makes things so much easier.

How do I exercise more control of the Syndicaton Box placement (the one with the xml gif inside)?

At the moment, I used the following code to place all the box elements (calendar, user account information, syndication):
theme_blocks("all", $this);
This is code taken from one of the examples. The core documentation doesn't exactly give me specifics about this function (docs say that it takes 1 arg instead of 2).

Any suggestions on just getting at one particular box element?

William

I am looking of a good 3-column theme that I can modify. It is really hard to tell from the themes on the download page which are this way. I think that most 3-column themes would work for me, but something similar to Ecademy (http://www.ecademy.com) is the general idea (content in the middle column).

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Ok..so this post isn't about the difference between blocks and nodes but about how to make different blocks and different nodes. I am getting myself ramped up on how the drupal system works and have some questions about the "preferred" way of doing things.

First about the blocks.
Currently I have found that the formatting of blocks seems to kept at a fairly high level (in that if you assign blocks to the left side or the right side they all look the same). Is there a preferred way of changing them in the theme so that they look different? I know that there can be changes at the CSS level...and that can do a lot, but I would like my changes to go a bit deeper than that. Eventually I hope to provide local navigation links on the left, and related links on the right. Within the theme (I am modifying xtemplate) I only see one "block" that can be modified...is there a way to add another?

Second, the nodes. I am noticing that the nodes look the same when in their teaser state, as the do within their expanded state. I'd like to make these look different so that the user knows that they are looking at an individual post rather than a list of posts. Will I need to modify the story or node module to create differences which tie into the template? I'd like to make as few changes to the modules and the drupal source as possible, so that i can upgrade i the future.

You can check out the work in progress at http://www.joshc.com/drupal.

Plese, I need some themes

When I view the Drupal site or my installation in IE 6 there is a constant "jumpiness" with the page rendering.

It looks like the page gets rendered without applying the CSS and then immediately renders it correctly with the appropriate style sheet for the theme.

It really looks bad though since it makes every page jump around.

When I view the site in Mozilla everything seems to render well.

Anyone know why this is happening?