Theme development

hi, i am creating a custom theme for drupal 6.x. i created a custom login box with the following code:

              global $user; 
              if ($user->uid >0)
                print '<a href="' . url('logout') . '" title="' . t('Logout') . '">' . t('Logout') . '</a>';
              else
                print '<a href="' . url('user/login') . '" title="' . t('Login or Register') . '">' . t('Login') . '</a>';
 

// placed inside a div tag.

I am trying to figure out the easiest way for having a custom frontpage layout. so I can create a workflow for my designers.

As this time I know there are different ways to achieve this:

1. Using if ($is_front) or if (!$is_front) conditionals in the page.tpl.php for including or excluding code in the frontpage
(i.e. for excluding $content of the front page), blocks can be configured to be showed only in the page

There are bullets with the links name, with also the pictures i want to use for the primary links. They are both showing one on the right and one on the left. I would like to get rid of the links and keep the pictures. Here is my site so you can see what i'm talking about, i would really appreciate it you would take a look. http://www.addingblogs.com/traffic i used the info on this page http://drupal.org/node/62149 but i dont know what to do, i tried everything.

I did a search for this, but didn't come up with a solution that worked for me.

Anyway, I'm upgrading from 5.x to 6.x and everything seems to be working fine so far. I'm working with my custom theme using the PHPTemplate system. My problem is that it isn't using my page.tpl.php file that lives in my theme folder. My other template files (like node-*.tpl.php) work just fine.

I have "engine = phptemplate" in my .info file. I've cleared the cache many times. I've visited the theme admin page and enabled/disabled my theme. Still no good.

I'm translating charityguide.org at the following development url: www.alisonstanton.com/charityguide

I have spent an untold number of hours trying to change the widths, re-changed every line of the zen layout-liquid.css, etc. to fix an IE7 bug which makes the right hand column display below the page content.

ANY thoughts would be appreciated.

I have a number of form buttons (Submit, Search, etc.) that I want to change from the normal buttons into images. However, I don't want to touch the code of the module that gives the buttons (ex. search). Is it possible to just edit the theme files to convert these form buttons into images? If yes, could someone point me to the direction on how to do it? :)