I’ve just finished reading both of these threads and i’m really happy people are willing to try the development work we’ve done so far in 1.8.
There are a few things going on that will need to be tested on different platforms (I have them working on mine and Peters platform at the moment)… the key bit to getting the theme applied correctly is the mod_rewrite is enabled and working from the provided .htaccess files and/or that you manually type in index.php. The intention is that mod_rewrite will be a requirement.
Regarding the SQL - i’ve changed that in my data.sql although I will also change the UserFactory to LEFT OUTER JOIN pages as a precaution.
Regarding development - i’d be more than happy to accept contributions - we’d even be happy to put forward some funding for getting some development work done (we are particularly needing in front-end dev). We had hoped that 1.8 would move the code into a format most developers would understand (with a little documentation to come). If you’d like to explore this in more detail please PM me.