The Developer Tutorials blog has posted a series they've worked up to show bloggers out there running WordPress how to create a custom theme from scratch:

In this multi-part series I'll detail how to create and design a Wordpress theme from nothing more than your imagination using Photoshop, CSS, XHTML and PHP.

Here's the list so far:

• Part 1 - getting the tools and an overall layout idea
• Part 2 - splitting it up to make the layout parts
• Part 3 - converting the Photoshop template to XHTML
• Part 4 - cleaning up the XHTML and doing some styling with CSS
• Part 5 - how to preload some images with Javascript to make the page load faster
• Part 6 - creating the WordPress-specific markup
• Part 7 - working up the PHP functionality
• Part 8 - integrating PHP into the template
• Part 9 - marking up the "framework" of the site (header/footer/sidebar)
• Part 10 - adding additional files like a links page and changing the posting template
• Part 11 (?) - deploying the theme out to the public view

While the Zend Framework works out how it's going to integrate complex views, Paul Jones posts about how the Solar framework makes it simple to work with views and layouts.

He breaks up the post into different sections for the kinds of view/layout and controller combination:

• Page Controller, View, and Layout
• Variable Assignment
• Other Layouts, or No Layout
• Multiple Formats
• Shared Layouts

The code in the post makes it simple to add an overall template for the site instead of having to add a header and footer to each view (or where the include doesn't belong).