multiple templates

Well, most (but strangely, not all) of the link-functions you are using have support for linking to a DIFFERENT file, like for instance: comments_link($file=”, $echo=true) where you can just pass a file name to generate links to a different file.
Also, if you’re using the CVS build (or if you wait for the next release) your permalinks can link to whatever file you want … that is, I have my permalinks set up so that the links LOOK like this: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/%pagenum%/ but they link to something like this /index.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5
This is configurable using MOD_REWRITE, so we can easily change it from index.php to use singlepost.php without any of our URL’s changing 😀
However, most WP bloggers just fiddle with their main index.php to configure it differently for single vs multiple posts, however if you have a look around, most bloggers (and WP bloggers more than other, I think) aren’t really doing anything really radically different with their template designs –no offense to those who are, or think they are– so if you want to do something more than copy other people’s designs, you’re most-likely going to have to figure it out on your own from the readme.html that came with your WP install.

For some reason, it’s hard to get a direct answer to questions about multiple templates. And the readme doesn’t really explain why visually identifying major site sections has to be such a pain…
But at least this guy wrote out the code to have archives individually styled by type of archive:
http://elasticdog.com/2004/10/faking-multiple-templates/

The question was about how to get unique styles on different types of pages — how do you style the individual post different from the front page for example. Most of the responses, like Jaykuls, are very genuine attempts to help, but they do also tend to avoid that question.
I was mainly noticing that on this thread, and other threads on this topic, there are several responses which suggest that styling different sections of a website is something the user should simply not want to do. It’s strange, because this is one of the only topics I’ve seen on the WordPress forums where this kind of response is fairly common. Also strange because the solution doesn’t seem to be all that hard…