Thanks for the response, Gizmo. I've been looking at theme.php very closely and reading the documentation and stickies on this board and I'm not sure if modifying the category list the way I want to is as straightforward as you make it sound (but I could be wrong). Let's see if I can explain myself better:
The default Coppermine theme (as well as every other theme I've seen) is set up so that each category is in its own table row. So in the $template_cat_list section of theme.php, it looks to me there is a header row with the headings ("Category", "Albums", "Files") and then each category is added to the page as 2 table rows:
<!-- BEGIN catrow -->
<tr>
<td class="catrow" align="left"><table border="0"><tr><td>{CAT_THUMB}</td><td><span class="catlink"><b>{CAT_TITLE}</b></span>{CAT_DESC}</td></tr></table></td>
<td class="catrow" align="center">{ALB_COUNT}</td>
<td class="catrow" align="center">{PIC_COUNT}</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tableb" colspan="3">{CAT_ALBUMS}</td>
</tr>
<!-- END catrow -->
So it's pretty straightforward for Coppermine to simply add these rows for each category no matter how many categories there are.
What I want to have is each category in a table CELL, so that I could, for example, have categories listed in a 3-column table with each cell containing a thumbnail and pertinent category info (# of Albums, files, etc). So it would pretty much look similar to what an Album list or thumbnail list can look like.
However, I can't simply replace the "catrow" construct above with a "catcell" construct, because I don't know how I would be able to "tell" it when to start a new row. So I would potentially have all my categories in a single very long row.
I looked down to where the template is for the album list in $template_album_list to see if I could get a clue from there, and indeed there is a template for each cell:
<!-- BEGIN album_cell -->
<td width="{COL_WIDTH}%" valign="top">
<table width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td height="1" align="center" valign="top" class="tableh2">
<span class="alblink"><a href="{ALB_LINK_TGT}"><b>{ALBUM_TITLE}</b></a></span>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center" valign="middle" class="album_thumbnails">
<img src="images/spacer.gif" width="{THUMB_CELL_WIDTH}" height="1" class="image" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; border: none;" alt="" /><br />
<div class="img-shadow"><a href="{ALB_LINK_TGT}" class="albums">{ALB_LINK_PIC}</a></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="100%" valign="top" align="center" class="tableb_compact">
{ADMIN_MENU}
<p>{ALB_DESC}</p>
<p class="album_stat">{ALB_INFOS}</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
<!-- END album_cell -->
But the number of columns to display in each row for albums is set in the "Album List View" section of the Configuration panel and there is no equivalent for the category list.
So I'm not sure this is possible without hacking code, which I'm not very good at (and would rather not since it makes it more of a pain when I update to new versions).
Another thing I was thinking of trying was to assemble the category "cells" as floated divs? I'll post here if I can get this to work, but any insight would also be much appreciated.