I've spent a lot of time trying to create a Gallery theme, since I wasn't too fond of any of the themes that came with the base install. This has proven to be extemely difficult, because it uses the Smarty Template Engine, which is ridiculous. Smarty's focus is on quick and painless development and deployment of your application.
The reason I think this is ridiculous is because it is designed like a programming language. Performing simple tasks may be simple with Smarty (I say may, because I really have no idea), but performing complex tasks is definitely complex. As a programmer who is well versed in several languages, I am having trouble following the code that is used in the Gallery files. It appears to be object oriented and requires in-depth knowledge of the underlying object structure. To make matters even worse, all the template files are littered with a mix of Smarty and HTML, which is another problem in itself.
Despite all these problems, I am getting close to a theme that I want to use. Hopefully, I'll be able to get it to a point that I feel I can start using it by the end of the weekend. After I have finalized the template, I need to figure out how the color packs work, so I can develop the color packs that I want to use for the different albums. I'm pretty excited about getting the theme and color packs finished, because I've wanted an image gallery like this for a while, and although the gallery I coded from scratch came out really nice, it definitely has its limitations.