It took me a long time when I first started using Drupal to conquer my fear of the Taxonomy module. With its technical sounding name, I figured you had to be a really smart advanced user to take advantage of something like that. The module description says "Enables the categorization of content." How am I supposed to know how to categorize my content? What if I do it wrong?
I have created a site at http://theming.isaacsonwebdevelopment.com that delivers a reasonably complete presentation on theming. It even includes a small custom module that illustrates how to create a themable function and a theme that overrides that function.
You may register on the site to view the presentation in your choice of four different themes: Garland, a garland sub-theme, an Andreas03 sub-theme, and a Fusion sub-theme. The Fusion sub-theme implements the theme function override.
There is only one file you must create in order to define your first custom theme: the ".info" file. Create a new subdirectory somewhere under your "sites" directory. For instance, try creating the subdirectory sites/all/themes/mycustomtheme. Inside that subdirectory you can create mycustomtheme.info. Note that you do not have to use the same name for the .info file, but it is common practice just to keep things logical.
Isn't it nice how Drupal provides a set of instructions on how to get started building your website? And isn't it neat how that disappears as soon as you create a piece of content that is promoted to the front page? To find out how Drupal does this, take a look under the hood by checking out the code at modules/node/node.module in function node_page_default() at line 1775 (as of Drupal 6.19).
The query statement that specifies to look only for content promoted to the front page is at line 1760 and looks like:
In my blog entry about the difference between the Page and Story content types I mentioned that one of the differences between the default Page and Story content types is that the Story content type is promoted to the front page. In this entry I will go into more detail about modifying your site's settings.
You get to the settings screen by navigating to admin/settings/site-information.
To get to the global theme settings page, navigate to admin/build/themes/settings/global. As stated at the top of the page
These options control the default display settings for your entire site, across all themes. Unless they have been overridden by a specific theme, these settings will be used.