The actual code in phptemplate.engine has been vastly reduced, and much of what it does has been made inherent to Drupal. The PHPTemplate renderer has been made the default renderer. As of Drupal 6, the primary purpose of a theme engine is to tell Drupal to use a different renderer (and, if they like a different extension. i.e, .smarty instead of .tpl.php).

Edit: The working group is: http://groups.drupal.org/themer-pack-working-group

It includes some minimal instructions (there should be much more after the Dojo session) and a signup wiki page.

Last weekend, a good friend of mine told me he wanted to redo his personal site in Drupal. His needs are quite modest; so modest, in fact, I could probably have pointed him at Wordpress and he'd have gotten exactly what he needed very inexpensively. But of course, we're both tech geeks, and he's already got experience with 2 Drupal sites and so it makes total sense to do this in Drupal.

Naturally, I immediately had ideas and went off and even though he was just asking me for advice, I took the piece of HTML he was using as a guideline and built his theme for him. And since his needs are modest, I figured the site could be done using Drupal 5 since very few addon modules are actually needed, and D5 itself is relatively stable now. And a little instability is fine for what amounts to a specialized blogging site.

Somehow I forgot to mention this on my blog, but a week or two ago I ported a theme from OSWD primarily for use on a friend’s site; as I got it ready, I realized I had only another hour (or 2 or 3..) of work to make it a fully usable theme, so I did.

The theme is called Antique Modern and the original is by Aaron Ganshow AKA wildleaf.