I'm wondering if anyone can give me info about Themes. On one of our new sites, we'd like to include boxes on the front page in the main content area with article excerpts. Ideally, we'd like it if one box can have recent posts, one box could have everything from a specific category and one could randomly display posts pulled from all categories *except* specific seasonal ones.

Does Thesis do this without a lot of manual coding?

We used Studiopress in the past and it included something like this, but our overall experience with Studiopress was unpleasant and we'd like to avoid that.

As it stands, I can hack our current theme (Atahualpa) which has been great for other things, but it will probably require a lot of work to make it work properly and I'd have to be sure to modify every time we upgrade, which I'd like to avoid... Any thoughts or recommendations?

Actually, we'd be open to any plugins that might do this, too...

Michael