Arras has a whole bunch of options that you can change in wp-admin to customize how it looks. I'm not too sure what a "css codex" is, but editing the arras css is just like editing any css or text file, you can use any text editor or you can even edit it through the wp-admin theme editor page.

There's some getting started info on the wiki that may answer some questions for you: http://www.arrastheme.com/wiki/doku.php

Arras comes with some hard-coded default widgets in the sidebar to get you started. When you add a widget in wp-admin, it removes all these default widgets, and just shows the one's you've manually added. But you can easily re-add the default ones again in the wp-admin Widgets page.

Yes the moz properties above work only in Firefox, however the webkit and khtml and border-radius properties make the rounded corners work in chrome, safari, konqueror, opera and IE9 as well.

It does NOT work in IE6, 7 or 8 (and probably not in really old versions of the other browsers either), however for these browsers the solution degrades gracefully and the user simply sees a site that has square corners rather than rounded ones. Yes, you do need to test these browsers to make sure everything looks OK, but I feel it's incorrect to say that it will look "horrible".

Never mind I found your site link in your profile. Looks like you haven't added anything to user.css yet, if you put the code there I'll have a look.

Generally speaking, when someone posts code here it's either CSS or PHP code.

The CSS code should go into "user.css" in your arras theme directory (wordpress/wp-content/themes/arras/user.css). This file is for user customizations to the them - keeping them all in the one place here makes upgrading arras theme easier in the future.

Help that involves editing PHP code is not as common, and you should only attempt this if you really know what you're doing. Best to stick with CSS changes for a while at least

If you want to get a bit more advanced again, you can create a child theme. It's not as hard as it sounds (arras comes with a sample child theme to get you started), and it means that upgrading arras is way easier.

Yeah, I understand. I reckon the only way you'll get that is to ditch timthumb (ie go with the wordpress featured images).

I wrote an SQL script to migrate from one to the other when I did my switch.

To remove it entirely, put this in your user.css:

.posts-default .entry-meta {
  display: none;
}

The second image has been resized by the "timthumb" library (look at the url), so I suspect that the algorithm it uses to do the resizing results in a bit of image degradation.

One solution *might* be to move to the new arras way of handling thumbs, through the WP "featured image" rather than the custom field.

You could possibly also use an image for this, as I have done on my site. Upload the image into an "images" directory in your child theme and you can do something like this:

.widgetcontainer ul, .widgetcontainer ol {
    list-style-image: url("images/right_arrow.gif");
}

Thanks, glad you like my site

The slideshow height can be increased through the arras options (wp-admin > Theme Options > Thumbnails tab). On my site I also moved the article title/excerpt below the slideshow image so it doesn't obscure the photo - this takes a bit of fiddling, but I can let you know how if it's something you're interested in.

Your best bet for embedding flash is to use a plugin. I just tried this one and it worked for me: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/swfobj/

It gives you a little "Add Flash Content" button when you're editing your post.

I'm not too sure what might be causing that. A few things you could try:

First try to disable all plugins and see if that fixes the problem. If so, re-enable them one at a time to try to find the culprit.

Have you made any modifications to the arras or wordpress files? If so revert your changes and see if that fixes the problem. You could perhaps try to do a fresh install of arras again (don't forget to back up any changes you've made first!).