Theme development

Hi, all,

I am new to Drupal, and must say that I'm very impressed with the design and the obvious amount of brainpower that went into this.

I'm trying to create a theme, but there isn't enough documentation on how to do this.

The docs point me to the existing themes to see how they were written. While I understand the PHP just fine, the context in which it is running is completely missing for me, since I know nothing about drupal.

Examples:
* When does the node() function get called?
* I can see in the resulting browser code (using the Marvin) theme that 2 columns have been defined. It's not at all obvious to me how that is controlled from within the .theme file...

The bug reporting system won't let me submit a bug, even though I was logged in and even though the instructions say you don't need to be logged in.

The drupal-devel mailling list is closed, and I'm not going to subscribe to a mailling list just to report a bug.

The theme in question is "Jeroen", linked on the download page, which is not even close to working and has obviously not even been tested; I fixed two bugs before it would even show up in the admin page selector:

1. The declaration was "class Theme extends BaseTheme",
it needs to be "class Theme_jeroen...".

2. It was completely missing the "system" function.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://drupal.org/:
"This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict" - 28 Errors

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://drupal.org/node.php?id=874:
"This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict" - 120 Errors

ujuijui ... quite some work to do ...

The new drupal.org theme shows the number of comments for a node (story) on the home page and also the number of reads. What is the piece of php I inline to display the number of reads?

Hi all,

I'm trying to get nodes grouped together in the middle of the front page by type so for example the lastest 10 blogs are together in a box or table one after the other from newest to oldest. Same for stories, events etc.. that will give users a quicker glance of what's going on in the site.

Any way to do this in Drupal:

(in it's own css div) November 26th 2002
(in their own css div) all posts for this day

(in it's own css div) November 24th 2002
(in their own css div) all posts for this day

and so on ... on the Druapl front page?

I really just need to know if you can group posts by day with a header above it... i have all the css details worked out...

Thanks for any help....