drupal theme for boran.com: acquia_marina, marinelli

I like dropdown menus and am not a fan of the way the core Drupal themes do it.

Just came across the acquia_marina theme having just migrated two sites to Druapl 6.5 where the garland dropdown with nice_menus / submenutree modules were used for dropdowns (See http://boran.ie and http://funbugs.ie)

With Drupal 6 not as many non core modules are needed, current favourites are node_privacy_byrole, admin_menu, imce, tinymce. The devel module is causing problems, sometimes freezing a site, seems to do massive mysql queries.

• This acquia_marina is very nice out of the box and highly flexible (many settings can be made from the GUI, even setting meta tags or title formats), so lets try to use it on this site? :-)
• The default colours and layout are nice indeed.
• My first problem was that I had problems making changes to the block layouts and the only theme settings I could see were global theme settings. Upgrading to v1.2 fixed this.
• I'd like to have the submenus of the primary menu displayed on the left and tried several ways. A) Add "Siblingmenu Tree Display" as a block on the left, B) Added submenu module, and added to the left. C) Add "Extended Primary Links" to sidebar first. Option C) worked.
• At the bottom I want to display my address, and a link/reference to both drupal and Acquia theme. The problem is that the current Acquia message is not configurable ($vars['closure'] in template.php). I could just print out $footer where $closure is in page.tpl.php. Hmm. Finally I configured the entire footer in Site Information, and removed the Acquia text added to $closure in template.php.
• Be careful when upgrading themes... I renamed themes/acquia_marina to acquia_marina1.1 and uploaded the new (1.2) version. This caused havoc. A better idea is first to set another them as default, then renamed acquia_marina to ".acquia_marina1.1" (note the DOT so Drupal will not parse it) and then upload the new version.
• When using the TinyMCE rich text editor, images could not be insert as a button was missing. The fixed was to add a function  phptemplate_tinymce_theme() to template.php as described  http://drupal.org/node/241753#comment-792305

To do

1. When editing a page, the "view as text" is not visible in this theme.
2. Find a way to save my mods to the theme (see footer mods above) so that they will survive upgrades to new versions of the theme later.
3. The default Drupal User  Login box is big and clunkly, I'd like it to be much small and more discreet.
4. Modify colours, bring them closer to the BC logo.
5. Change the background on the menu tabs on the top from white to transparent.
6. UPgrade to latest acquiam marine: but the structure of the header divs has changed, my image will no longer work. Why were such incompatible changes made?
7. ==> I think its time to create a new, personal, Theme.